The Crimes of Harvey Cushing

BALTIMORE – Every potential eyewitness present when surgeons covertly transported a 23-year-old Black woman from a New York mental asylum to a hospital down south just so that they could experiment on her brain – are all now dead.

While the victim’s name was never intended to be disclosed, with the benefit of time and the advent of the Internet we now know her name is Ida Jones. The young woman was brought to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) during the summer of 1910 and returned to New York in a pine box (minus her organs). This is but one example of how Hopkins became known as the body snatcher hospital.

Ida J, patient, in Cushing’s 1912 book
The Pituitary Body and Its Disorders

Although the details of Jones’ demise have been buried for over a century, parts of her brain (along with hundreds of others) are open for casual public viewing as part of a collection of human remains on display at Yale University’s library.

Ida Jones arrived at the racially segregated hospital not as a patient but as the intended lab rat for the celebrated “father of modern neurosurgery.” Harvey Cushing, head of Hopkins’ newly opened Hunterian Experimental Surgical lab, was an expert surgeon on dogs and monkeys before the institutionalized Black woman was delivered to him. Hopkins’ officials, eager to compete with Ivy League teaching hospitals up north, enthusiastically supported Cushing’s quest to forge a new surgical frontier specialty¹.

In addition to Jones’ remains, the museum in Yale library’s Cushing Center is the final resting place for brains removed from over 2,000 Cushing’s patients spanning his 35-year career as a neurosurgeon at medical schools at both Hopkins and Harvard University. In some cases, brains were removed without the patient’s knowledge and often in opposition to the family’s consent.

Generations of Baltimoreans have heeded the warning to steer clear of Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) at night fearing being snatched for medical experiments. Public officials and newspapers routinely dismissed the Blacks’ fear of roaming “night doctors” as tales of ignorance. For Baltimoreans of African ancestry, surviving fractured families using collective memory is a time-honored tradition. Passing along oral history has not only kept unsuspecting victims safe, but the lack of media acknowledgment adds yet another layer of trauma to urban existence.

Had it not been for Cushing’s dedication to documenting every step towards building his Brain Tumor Registry that he hoped would be his lasting legacy, we might not have ever known what happened to Ida Jones or be able to piece together the story of the human remains that Cushing collected. Most of what we know about the crimes of Cushing comes from his very own words, his dedication to taking photographs, and those who knew him best.

Exhibit A: The Deceased

As an inmate at the massive mental health asylum in New York City known as Wards Island, Jones was selected as a surgical experiment candidate on the recommendation of Cushing’s friend. As good fortune would have it (for Cushing), the Hopkins doctor was in need of surgical case studies for a lecture planned for later that year.

Ida Jones was brought to the east Baltimore hospital in the custody of New York City officials reportedly with complaints of headaches and failing vision on June 20, 1910. Ten short days later she was lying dead on the operating table with Cushing holding the bloody scalpel. X-Rays did not reveal any evidence of a “brain tumor” for case number XLII².

Circa 1930. Yale Collection. Harvey Cushing performing surgery at Harvard’s medical school.

Before Cushing arrived as a medical resident, Hopkins had attempted only two brain surgeries because of the mortal dangers. Surgery conditions were primitive with no monitoring system and anesthesia was often an afterthought.

Group C 07/30/2009 Cushing Brain Specimens in Glass Jars before restoration

The first of Ida’s two operations, Cushing caused massive and uncontrollable bleeding while cutting through the brain’s dura layer. Ida stopped breathing on multiple occasions, and she was resuscitated during the hours-long event. It was miraculous that Ida survived the first surgery on June 25, 1910.

A second operation was attempted on the 5’3” young woman five days later. Ida J bled out and died on the operating table, Cushing confessed in his book. However, a more antiseptic version is provided on the certificate he signed. Cushing blamed her death on a “brain tumor.”

On the certificate, the petite native of North Carolina is listed as married, a New York City resident, with no parents’ names provided. Her remains were reportedly sent to New York City on July 4, 1910, for burial.

In contrast, the 1910 federal census depicts Ida as an unmarried 22-year-old inmate at Ward Island. At the time, Ward Island was the largest hospital in the country with over 5000 patients on its grounds that covered 320 acres in Manhattan. Under the guidance of Adolph Meyer human experimentation without consent or caution was the norm instead of the exception.

It is assumed that Ida’s remains are buried unmarked in a mass grave in one of the city’s potter’s fields.

1910 federal census for Wards Island New York

Surgeon or Serial Killer?

Cushing often got away with murder. The evidence was kept in a private little black book that documented each death that was different than the data he published.

While at Hopkins, his patients’ mortality rate is often described as abysmal but without specific data. “[Cushing] seems to misstate his operative deaths,” wrote his biographer Michael Bliss.

Feuds erupted within the walls of Hopkins about Cushing’s lack of “scientific integrity.” Cushing complained to his father about negative press that lampooned his inadequacy based on the series of deaths that stemmed from numerous and consecutive fatal operative attempts.³

Hopkins provided little structure and often failed to reign in its young surgeons. “[Cushing] made significant mistakes. Pictures and descriptions of some of his cases suggest a tendency to overclaim for his organ [pituitary], that he may have been too eager to label a fat boy or a big man a pituitary problem,” wrote Bliss.

Cushing was not above ending the life of patients as Christopher Wahl wrote in his 1996 dissertation: “Not only does Dr. Cushing take action to euthanize his unfortunate, decerebrate patient, but he thinks nothing of revealing his intention in the operative note. By the standards of medical care today, Cushing’s actions would be morally and legally indefensible; in 1913, he could act with impunity”.

Assuredly Cushing’s actions would land him in prison today. On two different occasions Cushing used a baby’s brains in attempt to save the life of a wealthy and well-connected man from his home state of Ohio. When news agencies learned of the first brain transplant attempt, Hopkins officials issued an “indignant denial” that any such procedure had taken place, according to Bliss’s 2005 biography.

When news agencies learned of the brain transplant attempt, Hopkins issued an “indignant denial” that any such procedure had taken place.
Michael Bliss, Author, “Harvey Cushing A Life In Surgery”

The Ohio businessman (whose wife’s father was the grandson of ex-president William H Harrison) had been in a coma at Hopkins for nearly six months. William T. Buckner, twice received the pituitary of infants delivered at Johns Hopkins Hospital a procedure funded generously by his wife.

The first transplant failed, according to news accounts, because too much time passed between the infant’s death and the transplant. Hopkins procured the second infant (who died from malnutrition) with hardly any time passing before initiating the transplant. A brief mention indicates that they obtained the parent’s consent, but that is not substantiated, nor likely.

Headline of California newspaper from April 1912 that embarrassed
both Cushing and Johns Hopkins Medical School.

Exhibit B: An Active Crime Scene

Perched precariously between the promise of Pennsylvania’s freedom to the north and the seat of the Confederacy to its south, even today Baltimore remains an active crime scene, generations in the making.

Ida Jones took her last breath at Johns Hopkins Hospital, named for the wealthy Baltimore financier and enslaver. From its inception, Johns Hopkins institutions (the University and Hospital) have been one of unimaginable deceit, denials, and mythmaking that started with erasing enslaver from his official historical record.

Undated photo of children in the foreground of the domed Hopkins Hospital

Even while Hopkins’ parents and grandparents forced enslaved families of African descent to labor from birth to death on their Maryland tobacco plantation, Blacks were being transported through Maryland for risky medical experiments further down south. In her book Medical Apartheid, author Harriet Washington refers to the abundance of “clinical material” forcibly removed from people of African descent that fed medical research and medical training in the United States.

Another Black woman, Henrietta Lacks, unwittingly had her Cancer cells collected by Hopkins researchers after her 1951 death. Hopkins later shared the specimens with doctors around the globe without the knowledge or permission of her husband and children. Her family’s pursuit for justice continues today. Hopkins was also involved in the decades-long syphilis experiments at Tuskegee³.

With each passing decade, the more difficult it is to prove the elements of a crime, let alone one conducted in the privacy of a hospital surgical ward. The smoking gun in Cushing’s case remarkedly was his own published words.

The Verdict

Neither Hopkins nor Yale have commented on growing efforts to remove human remains of oppressed people from public collections, like the Smithsonian. Since the collection of brain specimens was brought out of its sub-basement in 2010, Yale University began exploiting the stolen remains by extracting DNA for additional study.

The Hunterian Lab today still exists but with modern facilities.

End Notes

1. In a major address in 1908 St Louis, Cushing described the over 300 craniotomies he performed in less than a decade when there had just been two in all the years prior to his arrival at Hopkins although 32 tumors had been identified and 13 had been referred to surgery. Christopher Wahl Dissertation.

2. The year before Ida was included in the 1912 publication about the pituitary that garnered him widespread attention, Cushing spoke about her at a New York gathering. Cushing also thanked the hospital’s pathology department for stepping aside and allowing him free reign over all the pathology of patient specimens (even those who died at his hand) without their interference.

3. Once the Tuskegee experiment story broke that revealed how Black men were left untreated for syphilis and permitted to die a long, slow death, the federal government responded to the crisis by requiring institutions who receive federal funding to have an “Institutional Review Board.”

Bibliography

Bliss, M. Harvey Cushing. A Life in Surgery. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2007.

Cushing H. The Pituitary Body and Its Disorders, Clinical States Produced by Disorders of the Hypophysis Cerebri. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott. 1912 [Google Scholar]

Fulton, J. Harvey Cushing: A Biography. The Classic of medicine library. 1946. [Internet Library]

Pendleton C, Adams H, Mathioudakis N, Quiñones-Hinojosa A. Sellar door: Harvey Cushing’s entry into the pituitary gland, the unabridged Johns Hopkins experience 1896-1912. World Neurosurg. 2013 Feb;79(2):394-403. doi: 10.1016/j.wneu.2010.12.007. Epub 2011 Nov 11. PMID: 22079823; PMCID: PMC3936577.

Wahl. C J. The Harvey Cushing Brain Tumor Registry: Changing scientific and philosophic paradigms and the study and preservation of archives. A thesis submitted to the Yale University School of Medicine in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Medicine, 1996.

Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid. Random House, 2019.

Johns Hopkins’ Brain Collector

The first dozen times Harvey Cushing experimented on the human brain as a young surgeon at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, nearly all of his patients died.

Professional failures¹ notwithstanding, medical historians have all but deified Dr. Cushing, commonly referred to as the father of modern neurosurgery. Following his death in 1939, newspapers lauded Cushing’s early cracks at intracranial surgery and unfailingly mentioned that the celebrity doctor’s daughter was married to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son.

“During the first few years [Cushing’s] mortality rates from operation[s] were high, so high indeed, that he was many times discouraged, and on more than one occasion the question was raised whether he was justified in proceeding.”
“Harvey Cushing A Biography” by neurophysiologist John F. Fulton published in 1946.

Cushing today is most known for his extensive collection of patient brains removed while he was a surgeon first at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and later at Harvard’s Peter Brent Bingham medical school in Boston. The final resting place for Cushing’s brains is at the Cushing Center in Yale’s medical library, since it opened in 2010.

Visitors are encouraged to take pictures of the rows of jars with floating brains and skulls lined up in cabinet drawers, but in a “respectful” manner. Although had Hopkins had its way, the 700+ brains collected by Cushing would be on display closer to the gravesite of gothic writer Edgar Allen Poe, but the good doctor declined the offer from the Baltimore hospital and chose his alma mater in New Haven instead.

Despite the slight, Cushing’s portrait is prominently displayed on Hopkins’ campus and a life-sized bust of him greats visitors in the neurosurgery administrative office.

Owning the remains of humans is no longer the flex it once was.

The ethical breaches that allow museums to display human remains today are camouflaged by referring to dissected and dismembered people as “specimens” and using “preservation of medical history” when they are actually discussing institutional exploitation of systemic social and political oppression.

Strong-Armed Autopsies

Hopkins’ early influence on the medical profession is indelible. So much so that when it set the low bar by using strong-arm tactics to obtain cadavers, it normalized insensitivity to survivors and cultures. Even today, the federal government has largely left regulations to state legislators, who in turn permit the medical community to enact and conduct oversight of its own standards of professionalism.

While at Hopkins Cushing boasted what was considered an astronomically high rate for obtaining consent for autopsies. A closer look revealed many such authorizations from grieving families were seized under “inauspicious circumstances.”²

Harvey Cushing (middle) surgical resident staff, Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1899 Yale University Online Collections

Later, while at Peter Bent Brigham (Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospital) in Massachusetts, rumors persisted that Cushing’s’ autopsies were direct results of coordinated body snatching of corpses so that he could stack up brains for his collection.

Under today’s standards, Cushing’s patient notes would likely land him in prison³. In June of 2023, the federal government indicted seven people on charges that they absconded with remains from Harvard Medical School as part of a human remain trafficking organization. Along with the manager of the school’s morgue, those indicted (including a mortician in Arkansas) are suspected of profiting off of “the desecration of stillborn babies, faces, brains, hearts, skin genitalia, bones.”

Biographer and close friend of Cushing, Fulton noted that Cushing’s 10 years at Hopkins and later his 20 years at Harvard, the celebrated brain surgeon instructed his staff to go to “great lengths” to obtain the bodies of “important or unusual cases” for autopsy. Uncovered in Cushing’s notes include descriptions of bribes paid to morticians as well as various ruses concocted to disrupt funerals in order to surreptitiously conduct an autopsy.

“I went over to talk to the man’s wife. They were right in the middle of the wake. When I told her what I had come for, she screamed and called us all names. The assembled mourners jumped up and grabbing whatever was handiest started for me. I easily led the parade for quite a distance.”
Cushing’s diary from January 1893 entry as published by biographer John F. Fulton

Cushing was hands on. “The Chief [Cushing] cut all the brains in his own cases” and afterwards provided pathology labs with detailed notes and specimens, is how Cushing’s administrative team remembered the activities at Brigham hospital to Fulton. Cushing’s “dry collection” includes thousands of brain matter specimens on slides, many obtained by “inauspicious circumstances” as well.

Building a Brain Museum and a Legacy

Largely unsaid by his biographers, but repeated often by his peers and critics, was that Cushing’s unflinching desire to create an archival brain registry could have compromised the medical needs of patients.

Cushing’s best and only hope at achieving a legacy suitable to his ego was to build the biggest and best brain museum the world had ever seen. Cushing’s legacy as the nation’s top neurosurgeon as he neared retirement was already being usurped by the more skillful Walter Dandy. The distinction for being the first was earned by European surgeons who had successfully removed tumors in the brain and the pituitary.

“Not many men … liked [Cushing]” said Bertram Bernheim, a Hopkins vascular surgeon and pioneer in blood transfusions. “He rode roughshod over [students] and was ruthless.”
From the 2005 biography Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery by Michael Bliss

When a career move took him from Baltimore to Boston and later to New Haven, Cushing brought what remained of his deceased patients with him – in bits and pieces. During modern medicine’s early years, all that existed by way of patients’ rights was the hope that trained doctors abided by the ancient Greece Hippocratic oath to do no harm.

Black and white photograph with man (Cushing) dressed in surgical scrubs standing over a young child in a hospital bed. They are both staring at the camera. — Title: Cushing and patient. Yale University Online. Harvey Cushing Photograph Collection 1920s to 1932

By the time Cushing died in 1939, he had photographed about 2,200 patients, captured extensive personal histories of each, and placed about 800 brain specimens in one-gallon jars (“wet collection”) cementing his legacy as the creator of the Brain Tumor Registry.

Photo negatives totaling 15,000 in the registry “tell the tale of human misery, bravery, suffering and triumph.”³ Black and white photographs of pre- and post-operative people of all ages (mostly with solemn faces seen confronting their mortality), have been the most celebrated aspects of the collection. Cushing often appeared in photographs with his patients.

Not so much as an asterisk accompanies Cushing’s official portrait or bust on display at Hopkins. The haunting photos of nude and nearly nude posing patients can be viewed either online (in a downloadable handy booklet) or in person at Yale’s medical museum. While other websites have alerts about those culturally sensitive materials, no such warning prepares for the display of human remains of people obtained by unethical methods. At present, some university museums (as well as the Smithsonian) are rethinking their continued ownership of human remains.

Hopkins’ Slippery Slope

The most famous coerced autopsy at Johns Hopkins occurred in 1951 after physicians discovered the unique properties of cells removed from Henrietta Lacks, a Cancer patient. During the course of her treatment Hopkins clinicians discovered that “HeLa cells” (named in her honor) were unlike any before in that they were immortal and would alter the course of medical research for humankind.

Lacks’ family on multiple occasions denied Hopkins’ request for an autopsy on the 31-year-old mother of five. When promised that the autopsy results would more than likely provide aid to the health of her young children, the family acquiesced.

Hopkins’ records indicate that the autopsy was performed at 10:30 am on the morning of her death and that the cranial cavity was not examined because permission was not received by the family. Whether or not Hopkins removed Lacks’ brain (or other organs)without permission is unknown.

Lacks’ descendants settled a civil lawsuit against a biotechnology company in August 2023 for profiting off of her scientifically unique immortal cells known as “HeLa cells”. It remains to be seen if the racial reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement will move Hopkins to repair the generational damage that lingers today over its foundational practices of oppression and exploitation.

The Problem with Museums

The unquenchable desire for humans to pursue ownership of other humans continues to be the most unaddressed issue in United States.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, there’s still not one good reason why Johns Hopkins University would keep a mummified adult in storage on campus for nearly 100 years. Finding no cultural value or without consideration of repatriation to Egypt, Hopkins allowed interns to unravel the carefully preserved 2,000 human for “scholarly use”.

At the hands of novice students in 1979 the contents turned to dust. The person’s skull with teeth as well as a few bones were placed in plastic bags for storage at Hopkins. It us unknown if and how the remains are stored.

In a separate mummy incident, Hopkins’ main draw for the opening of its new Archaeological Museum in 1988 was a mummified Egyptian person on loan from neighboring Goucher College. Instead of unraveling it, scientists used CT scans and facial recognition software to render a photographic likeness of the woman. On the website discussing the “Goucher Mummy” Hopkins announced a three-year project of “racism and repair” of its museum after winning a $4.4 million grant in 2021.

“In light of recent tragic and disturbing events surrounding the disrespectful use of deceased people in university departmental collections, our museum is reflecting upon and redrafting our collections guidelines and policies around the care of human remains.”
Website of Johns Hopkins University Archaeological Museum

UPenn Museum lent a mummified woman who lived about 2,300 years ago to a scientific consortium for autopsy in 1975. Out of the group of about 250 physicians and scientists, a handful took part, including the curator of the Detroit Institute of Arts, reported the New York Times at the time.

Scientists met ”once or twice a year to unwrap and cut up a mummy by day and party by night.”⁴ Those unable to attend were sent pieces of major organs or a bit of bone. Lungs typically were sent to University of California, eyes to University of Illinois and the lungs to Johns Hopkins.

The desecration of bodies uniquely preserved for thousands of years as a party game aside, the mainstays for display in medical museums are full skeletons, diseased hearts, fetuses, and whole brains. A visitor to the Warren Anatomical Museum (WAM), which opened in 1847 at Harvard University, gave her visit five stars on Yelp in 2009:

“Fabulously morbidly, but intensely interesting!” wrote the elite level poster. “Fetal skeletons, dried body parts, outdated surgical tools, kidney stones, skulls with various injuries and maladies”
Ashely P of Coventry Rhode Island on YELP

As of this the date of publication, Yale finds itself in the same predicament as many other museums grappling with the “ownership” of artifacts gained by questionable methods. Increasingly, museums associated with universities are being asked to reconsider the multitude of human skulls, body organs, bones and skeletons they have on hand.

Aggressive finger pointing between two Ivy-leaguers, Princeton and UPenn in 2021 reignited the thorny issue of medical ethics aka largely allowing physicians to police themselves. A news reporter revealed that two children’s anatomical remains who were killed in 1985 were not returned to their family for burial but instead ended up in Penn Museum’s 2019 anthropology collection.

“The idea that the museum was holding the bones of a Black Philadelphian who was alive as recently as 1985 in the same way that it has held the skulls of enslaved people, procured by grave-robbers, was beyond comprehension”
The New Yorker reported in 2021 on the revelation of “Move” bombing victims’ remains.

Johns Hopkins Leading from the Rear

A century ago, Johns Hopkins University rightfully boasted of its leadership in medical innovations but since the new millennium, it has fallen way behind the competition, when it comes to repairing harm cause by its racist past beyond token gestures using Black Lives Matter slogans. Hopkins’ neighbor in Washington DC, Georgetown University offers slavery reparations. Other universities consistently demonstrate increased social consciousness that has marked the opening decades of the 21st century but doing the work to make amends.

Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania apologized in 2020 for the “unethical possession of human remains” in its Morton Cranial Collection. A committee formed in 2021 acknowledged the grave robbing practices that helped build UPEN in its report which also included its findings and recommendation for repair and atonement. In 2023 UPEN announced repatriation plans to have the cranium of 20 people of African descent respectfully buried .

College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Müller Museum removed its online videos early this year seemingly walking back their promise to provide “disturbingly informed” content for thrill seekers. The removal was explained as temporary while officials contemplate policies on the continued display of people’s remains who never gave their consent.

Harvard announced the establishment of a Human Remains Returns Committee in a 2022 report to widespread support with the goal of repatriating the 3,200 skeletal and 900 fluid-preserved human remains in its museums.

At the time of publishing this article, neither Hopkins nor Yale have formed as much as a commission to study the ethics behind Cushing’s brain registry collection.

Endnotes

[1] Mortality rates for Cushings’ patients are detailed in Sellar door: Harvey Cushing’s entry into the pituitary gland, the unabridged Johns Hopkins experience 1896-1912. World Neurosurg. 2013 Feb.

[2] John Turner’s autopsy was performed without his family’s consent as directed by Cushing from Harvey Cushing, a Biography|. John F. Fulton. 1946.

[3] Upcoming in this series, The Crimes of Harvey Cushing. October 2023.

[4] The Harvey Cushing Brain Tumor Registry: Changing Scientific and Philosophic Paradigms and the Study and Preservation of Archives. Christopher Wahl. Yale University. Dissertation 1996.

[5] Mummy Autopsy Seeks Clues to Ancients’ Health. New York Times. 28 August 1975.

Next up: The Crimes of Harvey Cushing

The Science of Blackness: Maryland’s “One Drop” Rule

BALTIMORE – The British Royal family held their collective breath awaiting the skin pigmentation of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s children; meanwhile the sound that rippled across the pond revived the aged-old one drop rule debate in the United States.

Had their daughter Lilibet (pictured below) been born 100 years prior in Maryland, she would have been forced to live as a second-class citizen under strict rules that dictated a separate and distinctly inferior existence simply because her maternal grandfather was Black.

Marylanders had been living under the threat of detecting so-called Black blood since it was a colony and to some degree the rule remains today. By the early 1900s, with the Ku Klux Klan on one side and civil rights activists on the other, no one in Baltimore stood taller amongst the academic elite working to ensure the purity of the white race than John Whitridge Williams, a Johns Hopkins University (JHU) scholar.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with their son Archie (seated) and daughter Lilibet (lifted into the air) in an undated photo. Both children, if they were American would be considered Black under the one-drop rule.

Enter The Bull

After the abolition of slavery, the United States distinguished itself from England when it instituted and enforced Jim Crow laws. Segregation was necessary in order to subject the less desired class to an inferior existence. It was not an easy task to determine who descended from Africa to preserve the country’s white supremacy doctrines.

Called “The Bull” behind his back by students at JHU School of Medicine, Williams’ pedigree (grandson of Maryland enslavers) made him the perfect candidate to usher in codification of the “one drop rule.”

“His shoulders were unusually broad and his legs and feet unusually small. He had a characteristic, alert, short-strided gait, so that those of us who knew him well can still hear his walk as he hurried down the concrete floors of the hospital at three minutes after nine each morning.”
Alan F. Guttmacher, 1939 Johns Hopkins University Press on Dr. J. Whitridge Williams

The man who wrote the book on obstetrics was asked to birth a legal standard for Blackness. So highly regarded was the native Baltimorean that his influence extended beyond medical research to both judicial and legislative matters. The stage was set for “The Bull” to decide what some hoped would be the definitive case that would usher in eugenics policy.

Bluest Eyed Black Girl

Williams appeared in court in 1911 to state with scientific certainty whether a “colored” orphanage was the proper housing for the blue-eyed girl with no known parents whose family wanted her moved because they said was white.

Baltimore’s segregated orphanages (including the one funded in the last will and testament of Johns Hopkins himself at the same time he founded the university and the hospital that both carry his name) have a particularly ominous place in the city’s history of institutional oppression.

Dr. John Whitridge Williams known as “The Bull” in an undated photo.

Luella Leftridge by all accounts “looked white” to anyone who saw her. Nonetheless, the state’s legal system issued a writ of habeas corpus so that the Hopkins specialist could determine if Luella descended from African ancestors. Luella had pale skin, straight hair, and piercing blue eyes, according to court observers.

On one particular day inside a downtown Baltimore courthouse, “The Bull” gazed deeply into the 11-year old girl’s strikingly blue eyes. With zero hesitation, the doctor told the judge if there was indeed one drop of “negro blood” anywhere in Luella, it was not visible to him.

All that hung in the balance was the future of race-based societal constructs infused into the DNA of the country: subjugation, oppression, incarceration and segregation. It took very little prodding to lure the grandson of enslavers¹ into the raging debate of the day on whether the existence of “Black blood” could be scientifically proven.

“Line of demarcation between the whites and negroes is point to be settled”
21 February 1911 Baltimore Evening Sun

The Test For “Negro Blood”

Segregationists were keen over the prospect of having case law settle the concept of racial purity. Furthermore, a favorable racial ruling based on science instead of morality could bolster the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling decided just about a decade earlier.²

The entire nation was riveted. The plight of young Luella was splashed in newsprint in many southern states’ papers including Mississippi and North Carolina.

Hopkins applied medical jurisprudence’s four tell-tale characteristics of what it meant to be Black to the 11-year-old (thought to be) orphaned girl. Initially, Luella was deemed white because she did not exhibit any of the following:

Of minor concern to the medical community was that Luella actually displayed a fourth characteristic of Blackness: a barely perceptible shadow of a half-moon below the surface of one solitary fingernail. However, the consortium of doctors ruled that since Luella did not present three of the four for Blackness, she was deemed white (enough).

Newspaper clipping with a headline that questions how to if a girl with blue eyes is black.

Complicating matters was that a strikingly beautiful 19-year-old young woman (who appeared white) fought for her sister to be released from St. Elizabeth’s Colored Orphanage and Asylum. Elizabeth Leftridge herself had been an “inmate” for several years at St. Elizabeths, an orphanage that held Luella since she was four years old.

“The Bull” said without equivocation: Luella was white. In contrast, officials at the orphanage that housed only “colored children” held steady with their belief that at least one of her parents was Black, which made her Black regardless of her blue eyes.

“He wielded a tremendous power on the [Johns Hopkins] Medical Faculty and in the whole domain of American obstetrics” wrote former eugenics society vice-president Alan F. Guttmacher in 1939, about his close friend and follow obstetrician.

Williams’ pedigree notwithstanding, his conclusion that Luella was erroneously placed in an institution with all Blacks was not embraced by the legal community. Instead, an entire team of physicians was consulted. Just to be safe.

The medical experts all fell in line behind “The Bull.”

The attorney for St. Elizabeth’s orphanage and asylum, Charles J. Bonaparte_³, scoffed at the medical experts’ “superficial indications” that led them to conclude Luella’s blood was free of African ancestry. Instead, they believed the information received during the admission process that African ancestry was visible in the girls’ parents. They would have to find more relatives.

With little fanfare, the court abandoned science and resorted to the centuries-old one drop rule and kept Luella confined.

Tracing Luella’s Bloodlines

Baltimore’s quagmire made national news. The court could not risk seeming to be unsympathetic to an orphaned white girl tragically forced to live among the “lower race of people” on Baltimore’s west side. Nor could the court appear to be endorsing the jumping of social class by “passing.” Black girls ought not to be rewarded for fraudulently receiving all the privileges bestowed upon passing as a white woman.

Whatever appetite the southern elite had for a scientific process to determine race, it all waned once the credibility of a heralded institution was challenged. At stake was the uninterrupted brutal enforcement of Jim Crow‘s separate and unequal codes that systematically oppressed anyone with suspected Black ancestry.

Perhaps more importantly, white men had to be protected from being tricked into marrying someone of lesser worth and fathering Black children.

The orphanage located the girls’ paternal aunt, a Black woman living outside of Pittsburgh. She testified that her brother, married a white German woman and Luella and Elizabeth were half Black and half white.

Ultimately, the judge decided that Luella must stay in the substandard orphanage designed to hold only Black children.

In the starkest of terms, Judge Alfred S. Niles’ court embraced the one drop rule which had served white supremacists well since their beloved Antebellum days.

Maryland, as did other southern states that legalized slavery, had greatly benefited from the rule that counted children as part of the Black race if either of their parents had at least one Black grandparent (of any degree of African ancestry).

Not Really Loving Interracial Marriages

Despite Williams’ failure in making race determination a science, in the end, all parties were united in keeping Black and white children separated until the Supreme Court in 1954 decided the practice must end because of its unconstitutionality.

However, it remained illegal for any Black man to marry a white woman in Maryland until the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in the 1967. Colonial Maryland has the distinction of having the first ever legislation banning miscegenation.

"All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person of negro descent to the third generation, inclusive, are forever prohibited and shall be void; and any person violating the provisions of this section shall be deemed guilty of an infamous crime and punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary not less than eighteen months nor more than ten years"

Section 200, article 27 Code of Public General Laws state of Maryland

Fast forward 100 years since the 1911 Luella case to 2011 to when Oscar winning actress Halle Berry evoked the one-drop rule in a custody case with her daughter’s father. Berry’s daughter, a French-Canadian actor.

Berry cited that since her own father is Black, that makes her daughter Black as well even though the child’s other three grandparents are white. Her argument was that you deserved full custody in order to impart the importance of Black culture on her mixed-race daughter. J. Whitridge Williams must be turning in his grave.

^₁J Whitridge Williams’ grandfather (John Whitridge) was also a physician as well an enslaver. His grandfather was born in Rhode Island in 1791, relocated to Maryland in 1820. He is listed as the owner for people enumerated on the 1850 and 1860 census slave schedule.

^₂ The Supreme Court ruling on Plessy v Ferguson in 1896 that permitted Louisiana rail cars to segregate accommodations based on race set for the separate but equal doctrine that became Jim Crow.

3Charles Bonaparte, the Baltimore-born lawyer who represented the orphanage in the Luella case was a former US Attorney General in President Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet. His grandfather was Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother.

Next up: Eugenics Takes Hold in Baltimore

Notes from Maryland: The Perils of Electing a “house Negro”

Determining a “real one” from a “house Negro” is no easy task.

Maryland, by virtue of being the most northern of the country’s southern states, is uniquely positioned to tackle the challenge of ascertaining the validity of one’s card, especially if that person is seeking election as representative of an oppressed people.

Since the gubernatorial election is mere weeks away pitting Dan Cox (R), who has displayed sympathy towards white supremacist ideology against neophyte Wes Moore (D) a Black graduate of Johns Hopkins, it is Baltimoreans’ solemn duty to peel back the layers on the Black man selected by primary voters to impede Cox’s path towards the state’s governorship.

Blacks are unfairly burdened by dual loyalties when attempting to navigate the minefields of combating white supremacy and pursuing political aspirations. In Wes’ case, his origin story has left him vulnerable to critique about his authenticity; Moore enjoys favorable press considering weeks before the election he has been a no-show at the candidate conference and has declined debates. He essentially is playing the I’m Black, vote for me (because the other guy is a white devil) card.

Less Is Known About Wes Moore

Westley “Wes” Watende Omari Moore, an author, motivational speaker and military veteran from the DMV (or maybe even the Bronx, but definitely not from Baltimore) is brand new to politics and has no record to stand on or defend. For someone constantly in the limelight, there is very little known about his politics or his world view beyond talking points.

The grandson of Cuban and Jamaican immigrants gained celebrity status from authoring the biographical 2010 book: The Other Wes Moore, Two Fates. Wes once aspired to be an NBA star and president when he was a teenager. He has come closer to commander and chief than lacing it up against Steph Curry. His Curry is slated to produce a feature film based on the book.

Gov Larry Hogan(R) and Candidate Wes Moore (D) 19 August 2022. Facebook Screengrab.

In 2006-07 while working as an investment banker in New York, Wes served as an assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in George W. Bush’s administration. Although the selection as a White House fellow was seminal moment, Wes claims not to be beholden to either party’s ideology nor does he speak often about either Condi or W. Wes supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries over the eventual winner, Barack Obama.

Moore is leading in the polls, unlike the last Black man who captured the Dem’s nomination for the state’s executive chair. In the 2018 election, former head of the NAACP, Ben Jealous lost badly to incumbent Larry Hogan who greatly benefited from positive press endorsements and a lack of media scrutiny. Born in raised in California, Jealous’ mother is a native of Baltimore. Jealous’ parents, real ones by any measure, were activists in the monument city during the height of civil rights movement.

Baltimore has a proud history of laudable civil minded leaders that shepherded the city away from its Confederate-leaning roots: Rev. Harvey Johnson, Thurgood Marshall, Lillian Carroll Jackson, Juanita Mitchell, Carl Murphy, Walter P. Carter, Pete Rawlings, and Kurt Schmoke come to mind. The power couple of Willie and Victorine Adams were legendary for their realness. In comparison, Johns Hopkins surgeon and Donald Trump confident Ben Carson (a Detroit native) who Baltimore embraced like one of her own, is someone we would like to forget.

Oreo, Coon, Stepin Fetchit are some of the more incendiary terms tossed around when Blacks reach a status of visibility in established white-led institutions. Being called “house nigga” is the accusation most relevant to the Maryland experience thanks to Johns Hopkins.

Screengrab. The Atlantic January 2019 (L to R) Donald Trump, Darrell Scott, Ben Carson

HUD Secretary Ben Carson is imminently qualified to be a House Negro, but remains as unqualified as ever to lead HUD
Keith A. Owens, Michigan Chronicle, 17 August 2017

Understanding the past can help frame today’s dilemmas. When used improperly “house nigga” can be disparaging and downright disrespectful, but in Maryland’s case it’s a literal interpretation of what happened in elections in the not-so-distant past.

Maryland’s first documented political “house nigga” died in 1981 at age 91. His name was J. Alvin Jones and his grandfather, James Jones, was enslaved by the wealthiest man in the state (at that time) Johns Hopkins.

Puppet and Puppeteer

Being a Black voter is exhausting. Beyond the normal work of analyzing candidates’ platforms and separating the bluster from actual policy, Blacks have an additional burden that stems from institutions of white supremacy using Blacks as front men. It happened with J. Alvin Jones.

Because of the lack of real power afforded to minoritized people in systems dedicated to upholding white supremacy, Blacks must ascertain whether the person is authentically representing the interests of the Black community or if candidates are merely puppets and simply executing the white man’s bidding.

Ebony magazine featured J. Alvin Jones in a December 1959 article that included a photo (pictured below) of then-governor James Millard Tawes standing behind Jones casting a great shadow. The governor is pointing out a window overlooking Mount Royal station in central Baltimore where Jones’ eyes is transfixed.

The photographic depiction of “house Negro” has never been captured so clearly.

Ebony Magazine. December 1959. Google Books.

J. Alvin Jones’ single term as state senator in 1958 started under the direst of circumstances: at the behest of party bosses. Jones’ soul qualification was that he was an educated Black man that had no baggage from a previous run for office. Before party boss “Jack” Pollack spearheaded his campaign when Jones was 69 years hold, Jones had spent his adult life with patronage jobs on the federal, state, and municipal levels.

Blacks, wary of the political machine, never embraced Jones the way they did the first Black elected in 1954 Delegate Harry Cole (who preceded him) or Verda Welcome (who defeated him) who both received grassroots support. The Black voter registration drives were working.

Pollack was Baltimore’s first Jewish boss, and during the 1940s and 1950’s the city’s most powerful boss. Operating from a base in the northwest part of the city, he picked and elected candidates to the state legislature, City Council, judgeships and the judicial clerkships.
Washington Post, 18 March 1977 “Baltimore Buries Once-Powerful Boss“

Although it was not publicly reported and few Blacks likely knew in the 1960s, Jones’ grandparents had a cozy relationship with the wealthiest of white city’s financiers one hundred years prior, straight off the tobacco plantations – The man Johns Hopkins himself.

Sad. J. Alvin lost his senate seat in a contested primary that signaled the weakening of Pollack as a Democrat party boss in the city of Baltimore. The first Black woman elected, Verda Welcome denounced any association with organized political leaders suggesting any Black who did was a puppet. “I am that man’s worst enemy,” Welcome was reported as saying in a November 1, 1962 Baltimore Sun article. Morgan State University students at the gathering made it clear that any Black politician backed by Pollack or accepted the fund-raising money Irvin Koven, another leader in the city’s Jewish community, was to be distrusted.

Welcome’s enemies were more than haters, they were homicidal. Struck by two bullets, the North Carolina native, survived an assassination attempt in April 1964, midway into her first term. Five men associated with the Democratic party were charged with conspiracy to kill the woman who gathered grassroots support to obtain her seat; four were convicted. The bullet to Welcome’s back and heel certifies her “real one” status. Her tenure in the state house lasted 25 years.

So many have given so much to squander if the candidate will not be answerable to the Black community’s concerns, especially by a Black man who moves comfortably within the higher echelon of the Johns Hopkins power brokers.

Six Degrees of Johns Hopkins

J. Alvin Jones was born to John “Johnsey” Jones and Hattie Taylor on 20 November 1889. He was their only child. In 1913 he graduated from University of Pennsylvanian a private school in Philadelphia. After serving in WWI, he married Clara Baptiste of Pennsylvania and had two sons, J. Alvin Jr and Jerome. He had no known grandchildren.

His sons were not known to have served in public office, but enjoyed patronage jobs in the city. Picture below, J. B. Jones, was a city housing manager, and later oversaw the mass relocation of Black residents as part of the city’s “urban renewal” programs from his office in West Baltimore.

Jerome Baptise Jone obituary, 28 April 1970 Baltimore Sun

Straight from the Literal and Figurative Planation

Maryland’s new constitution of 1864 prohibited slavery. J Alvin’s father “Johnsey” was born a free person in 1866. J Alvin’s grandfather’s status under the new Constitution transitioned from being enslaved by multi-millionaire Johns Hopkins to being employed by him.

Clifton Mansion. The summer home of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

J Alvin’s grandfather, James Jones. was born in Virginia in about 1820. He was enslaved by the Tayloe family in Virginia and during a visit, Hopkins took a liking to James and brought him to Baltimore. James’ inclusion on the 1870 census kick-started the debate over the veracity of Hopkins’ PR machine that promotes him as an abolitionist.

Johns Hopkins, railroad magnate and banker, derived forced labor from James Jones for nearly four decades in the industrial port city of Baltimore. There were zero crops that needed harvested, only wine to be poured and dinner parties to host. Hopkins, from a family of Quakers, was wealthy enough to pay good wages for servants to run his bathwater and clean his bedsheets as he admired the artwork that adorned his Saratoga St winter home and his Clifton Mansion summer home.

1860 Federal Census for Johns Hopkins the president of Merchant Bank worth $2 million

After emancipation James stayed on as Hopkins’ servant. The city’s cantankerous bachelor banker/political influencer remembered Jones in his will with a $5000 payday in 1873 (roughly $130,000 in today’s valuation). Formerly enslaved men in Baltimore with no other marketable skill and lacking a formal education crowded almshouses or other penal institutions.

Jones, his wife Elizabeth (both identified as “mulattos”) and their children lived a quiet life in a house they owned with white eastern European immigrants as neighbors – outside of the strict racial redlines that kept Blacks in substandard housing. James continued to work as a servant/waiter up until he died in 1893.

1870 Federal Census for James Jones and wife Elizabeth, both unable to read or write

J. Alvin attended Douglas High School and later the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania school and graduated with an engineering degree. The WWI vet worked patronage-provided government jobs on the federal, state and city level before Pollack selected him to defeat Cole. Once his short-lived political career was over, Jones returned to work in a variety of civil service jobs and generally lived the remainder of his life in obscurity.

The year he died, 1981, the grandson of the former enslaved man from Virginia had truly moved on up as he lived and died in a high-rise apartment in the Charles Village area, a stone’s throw from Johns Hopkins University.

“All skin folks ain’t kin folk”
Melanated peoples since forever

Annapolis has been influenced by those with white supremacists’ ideals since the days before, during, and after Johns Hopkins wielded extreme political power that resulted in a hospital and university in his honor. The path to Annapolis is littered with the Black names discarded by the machine they served: Catherine Pugh, Cheryl Glenn, Nathaniel Oaks, are the most recent casualties. The ethics surrounding Gov Larry Hogan’s questionable, but lucrative business dealings have mostly gone unexamined.

Calling out Frauds

To catapult his name recognition, Wes Moore benefited from people believing he was a “Baltimore native.” Who could not pull for a troubled Black boy of a single mom succeeding despite the challenges posed by being educated in the city’s public schools during in the 1980s crack era? The problem is, he never went to school in Baltimore. Forever on the wrong side of history, The Baltimore Sun editorial board’s stance is that there ought to be more Wes Moores.

Wes Moore, pictured in front of the city landscape where he was not born and raised.

Moore, the author/candidate let the lie stand because he wanted to be seen as a “real one” like the other Wes Moore that he wrote about. Moore calculated ways to avoid suffering the fate as J Alvin Jones. Moore’s gamble is to present himself as a man of the people without having a rigorous debate where he faces the people. Moore declined Morgan State University’s invitation to debate. A single debate is scheduled for October 12th.

Black Republican Trump supporter Herman Cain famously embraced the term “house Negro” and urged author/candidate Ben Carson to do so as well. This followed an opinion published in a Michigan paper shaming Carson as a House Negro who ” forfeited the well-earned status of a brilliant medical career” to gain proximity to power. Cuba Gooding, Jr portrayed Carson in the Hollywood production of his book “Gifted Hands”.

“If being called a ‘house Negro’ is what some of us must endure for succeeding in this nation and thinking for ourselves, then let all of the ‘house Negroes’ stand up and be counted,” – wrote Herman Cain, Black Republican and Donald Trump supporter
Taryn Finley, HuffingtonPost.com 2017

Who gets to rise to the top in Maryland politics may not be groveling for anointment by the party bosses of yesteryear (to be sure the Curran family of old Baltimore still has weight today). In some ways not knowing who may be pulling the strings is even more disconcerting. Diligence in discovering to whom Black leaders may be beholden must remain a priority.

The struggle is real. All Marylanders, regardless of race, religion, or socio-economic status deserve more than someone competent in maneuvering amongst the power elite. If the first Black Governor does not pledge to dismantle the systems of white supremacy, he will be remembers only as the most recent in a long line of house Negroes.

David “I-Can-Say-Nigger” Simon

In all the ways that count most to Black people David Simon unequivocally embodies the absolute worst of what is known as the “white moderate” male in the United States. Although his infractions are numerous, what draws the most ire is Simon’s casual and frequent use of “nigger” and “nigga”.

The most noteworthy incident in question occurred (not surprisingly) in the Trump era with Simon tweeting “Hannity my nigga!” on Monday 19 September 2016. It was a tongue-in-cheek greeting between two white men in response of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s announcement of a planned outreach effort to engage Black voters.

Although a firestorm ensued, it was not the first time that David Simon poked the bear by saying that word.

The disparaging racist language earned him a short-term suspension from the app, but not after days of defending himself. During that time Simon dug in his heels, claimed artistic freedom, and addressed his detractors as “hall monitors.” Sonja Sohn, the Asian/Black actor who portrayed Kima on HBO’s The Wire, was one of the few who came to his defense.

Screengrab taken on June 20, 2022 Twitter

White moderates have been the bane of activists toiling about in the struggle demanding the end of white supremacy even before Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote about his in exasperation in a letter from the Birmingham jail in 1963. The audacity of white men who as King noted have not seen “hate filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity” to suggest a more palatable way to be treated as a full citizen that should come as a birth right.

FILE — In a Jan. 14, 2010 file photo David Simon looks on during a panel discussion in Pasadena, Calif. It was announced Sept. 28, 2010 that Simon is among 23 recipients of the year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants.” (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello/file)

When dripping from white lips, the dark stain that comes word “nigger” triggers the blood memory of violence, angst, subjugation. While Simon relishes its artistry, he simultaneously riles the sensibilities of our ancestors even 60 years after King’s admonishment. No federal holiday commemorating the end of enslavement championed by a white moderate cis gendered male president can provide a respite from the likes of David Simon and his devoted legion of outspoken white male fans.

What is insufferable though about the creator of the 20-year old cop drama is his “whitesplaining” to Black people how his artful use of the word is not of the offensive variety. It is this audacity that shifts the responsibility for peoples’ recoil squarely back on their Black shoulders. It’s satire, he proclaimed frequently, evoking the “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke” axiom.

Weeks after initially posting and defending his choice, Simon displayed a small measure of introspection with two tweets on September 20, 2016: “Don’t see it as an imprecise choice, but do I wish I tried another tack to insult Fox’s racial hegemony? Sure.” Long after Trump lost his re-election bid, and with the benefit of hindsight, David Simon responded, but not with an apology. “Stand by it as an answer to a white racist…” Simon Tweeted on June 20, 2019. The tweet remains live today on Elon Musk’s Twitter even after the murderous death of George Floyd and the immergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Truth is, Simon knows his white male privilege. The wrists slaps were factored into his calculation for all chances he took once he left the DMV for Baltimore. He spoke on his world view to graduates of his alma mater, Chevy Chase-Bethesda High school, knew it too when he spoke at the 2012 graduation:

“Certain things were assumed for my life. The guardrails were all there. The airbags all worked. I might come through with a few dents and scratches, I might screw up here and there, but by and large, the risks I was asked to take were for the most part moderate and plausible. I was going to have to work some, and get a little lucky, sure. But for real, I grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland. I mean, damn. Nice work if you can get it.”

Simon’s Revoked Hall Pass

Simon was given an inch of rope and thought he was a cowboy. “Nigga” stopped being something a Black character said and something the white David Simon tossed around carelessly. For introducing the Stringer Bell and Omar to the world, David Simon was given a temporary pass similar to the one Samuel L Jackson extended to Quentin Tarantino.

Actor Michael K. Williams as “Omar” publicity photo for The Wire.
Undated. Uncredited.

Simon’s temporary pass for saying that one word was identical to the laminated one former president Bill Clinton stores along with an emergency condom in his pocket. The pass was granted to Simon to use poetically in telling our stories; Clinton was offered one for playing the Saxaphone on Arsenio Hall’s late night talk show. Both white men have shown that all passes extended should be hereby immediately revoked. No white male moderate American should be issued another pass in the future.

Before the Fox News dust up that got tongues wagging, Simon took “nigger” out for a test run on Twitter two months earlier. No one barely noticed. Using the same tactics, Simon donned the persona of former president Richard Nixon and attacked the policies of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump:

“…let’s clamp down on the hippies and the niggers and the eggheads who are fucking us up”
David Simon, Twitter July 12, 2016

Since his coat was not severely pulled for that transgression in September, Simon put on the equivalence of Black face and started the shuck and jive routine against Hannity – this time for a larger audience.

The Washington Post made Simon’s transgression palatable to its white moderate readership when it rhetorically presented Simon’s defenders’ point of view that Simon has carte blanche to use the word because he wrote artful television shows in the realism prism depicting multi-dimensional Black characters.

If you’re not black you shouldn’t be saying “Nigga”. Plain and simple… If you can omit ‘faggot’ and ‘bitch’ from your vocabulary then why is it so hard and strenuous for you to omit ‘nigga’?
Malcolm-Aimé Musoni, HuffPost.com September 26, 2015

Racism and misogyny rest comfortably within Simon’s wheelhouse. It’s been pointed out that the reasons white males bristle over the n-word is explicitly because it’s off-limits to them. Hollywood writer/producer/actor Quentin Tarantino famously penned the word “nigger” as dialogue for himself to utter on screen.

On his personal blog, on the day commemorating Juneteenth in 2013, Simon wrote about data mining, specifically cell phone’s metadata and peoples’ right to privacy in an essay that he titled The “Nigger Wake-Up Call.” It is painfully clear that the joke went over Simon’s head. Paul Mooney’s running gag is about Blacks who are suddenly jarred into reality after believing they had achieved post-racial equality.

Simon usurped Mooney’s comedic genius for the shock value of merely using the word. What is the point of having the pass, if you don’t use it, eh David?

Simon’s ability to write authentic dialogue reflective of his immersion into Baltimore’s street culture as an observer allows him extreme latitude in his personal interactions to call people “nigger” or “nigga”. In this case, he used the latter, a distinction he made without commenting on the difference between the two.

“Simon’s works have made him a sort of elder statesman regarding the intersection of race, politics and socioeconomics in America
Cleve R. Wootson Jr, Washington Post. September 20, 2016.

Simon himself rejected the idea that he has a pass to use the n-word indiscriminately. He wrote on Twitter (which oddly enough is akin to him saying the words from his own mouth) on October 7, 2016: “And if I used the term on AA, hand me my head. Satirically, on a white con man claiming rep of AA interests? Hey.”

It should be noted also, that Simon uses African American, AA, and black (not capitalized) without any clear distinction of why. Journalists abide by AP stylebook which requires capitalization of Black as a race and the distinguishes African American as applying to both race and ethnicity, but are not interchangeable.

“Simon is no longer just a journalist or a writer: he’s become a de facto translator for middle class audiences looking to understand elements of black America.”
Lanre Bakare, “Go home, David Simon. Without Justice in Baltimore, there can be no peace. The Guardian.com 28 April 2015

The Enemy of my Enemy is a Friend Fallacy

Pinpointing the extent of Simon’s supposed allyship requires the dexterity of Simone Biles. For instance, in July 2019 when Donald Trump blasted west Baltimore as “rat invested” and placed blame squarely on then Congressman Elijah Cummings, Simon lashed out at Trump and called him a “racist moron.” Simon’s defense of his adopted city has ingratiated Simon into many locals’ good graces.

However, in 2015 when Freddie Gray was killed in custody of the Baltimore Police Department, Simon seemed more aligned with law and order than the community marching in the streets. In fact, once Baltimoreans took to the street as an uprising against racial oppression was brewing, Simon penned a plea for an end to direct action.

President Barack Obama “interviews” David Simon on police culture in 2015. The president, seeking Simon as a potential ally, probed Simon for ways to change the culture of policing by seeking out ways to encourage historically racist institutions to see the humanity in the people and communities affected by their presence. Simon suggested maximum prison sentencing as a solution.

“White people — even those who speak up about black causes, like Simon — don’t have the social capital to throw around the n-word in everyday speech,” said author Jody Armour as quoted by the same 2016 Washington Post article.

Enter the Wu-Tang

If David Simon stopped saying “nigger” his family would starve. He is royally compensated many times over for putting “nigger” on a page. Unscientifically, David Simon has written the word hundreds (if not thousands) of times.

His seminal work, The Wire ran for six seasons and has a loyal fan base. During its 10-year heyday, his internal voice must have tried out every iteration of that word’s pronunciation. But Simon says he’s never “said” the word. (If he read any of his scripts out loud, merely playing the percentages, he has surely said “nigger”).

“Nigga, is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?! The fuck is you thinking, man?”
“The crown ain’t worth much if the nigger wearing it always getting his shit took.”
“Fuck them West Coast niggers, cause in B’more, we aim to hit a nigger, you heard?”
“This motherfucker be killing niggas just to do it. You see? Nigga kills motherfuckers just cause he can. Not cause they snitching, not cause it’s business, but just because this shit comes natural to him. Man, Little Kevin is gone! This nigga don’t feel nothing!”

Not to split hairs, but an argument could be made that there’s a world of difference between writing dialogue for a “gritty” “urban” television drama and when someone uses their personal Twitter account to flaunt their pass to their 334,000 followers gained as a result of their Hollywood celebrity status. The former is economic, the latter is all ego.

As the rapper Method Man (who portrays Melvin Wagstaff in season two of The Wire) of the Wu Tang Clan drops a verse in the 2014 hit CREAM:

Cash rules everything around me
C.R.E.A.M., get the money
Dollar dollar bill, y’all

Before there was beaucoup money to be made in a cinematic depiction of Black Baltimore, there was the use of “nigger” in Simon’s journalism career at the Baltimore Sun.

Simon’s literary success was sparked by shadowing Black people’s daily struggle of existence in West Baltimore as a journalist. He culminated the experience not by lobbying for resources, but by writing a 1997 book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood that he co-wrote with Baltimore Police Department (BPD) detective Ed Burns.

Simon’s first book mentions “nigger” 47 times and “nigga” four.

The book was made into a critically acclaimed HBO six-part mini-series The Corner, directed by Baltimorean Charles “Roc” Dutton, who is Black. Residual checks keep coming. In contrast, odds are that the Black youth he shadowed in order to craft a realistic creative expression are in jail, prison, on parole or probation.

On DavidSimon.com, he lists two charities as “worthy causes“: The Ella Thompson Fund and The Baltimore Station as well as one scholarship fund. Simon wrote it is “probable that [donations to the organizations listed] will directly address an issue locale or dynamic that we dramatized.”

The Sun Rises on The N-Word: David’s Early Years

It is difficult to pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when David Simon began taking a liking to the word tied to generational oppression of a people from African descent.

As is the moderate’s want to ask “where are his parents?, Simon admits the complexities of race was not a matter discussed at all in his house. In the next (and final) part of this series, the genealogy of Simon is explored putting into historical context some of the influences that undoubtedly shaped his world view.

Once the college grad from the Washington DC suburbs was dropped into Baltimore in the early 1980s, it was no doubt a culture shock. It would be totally understandable if the word “nigga” being tossed around like crime scene tape sent the cub reporter on the cops beat into full blush.

What was Baltimore to a kid from Montgomery County? It was another world, another America. Maybe not all of the city, but those quadrants that had been left behind…
David Simon, Graduation remakes, Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School June 4, 2012

Simon’s first few years as a working journalist at the Baltimore Sun was an extension of his self-proclaimed college years – lazy and uninspired. From 1982 through 1984 the assignments were routine, and the reporting was generic; the combination offered little by way of opportunity to hone a writing style.

There were glimpses, though. Simon shone a sympathetic light on libertarian Warren Eilerston who beat federal criminal charges for refusing to pay federal taxes in August 1983. Also, in 1985, Simon deftly covered a shift in BPD policy after the public balked at the lack of transparency after a string of police shootings where the officers were either not identified to members as part of a “news blackout” and/or the officer refused to give a statement to investigators.

It would not be long before Simon’s byline would be inked above the word “nigger” published in the city’s paper of record. The subject of the 1988 story was a 51-year old resident of Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood who worked as a barmaid in 1963.

It was the occasion of the 25th anniversary of a murderous hate-crime where Hattie Carroll was caned to death by 24-year old William Santzinger for not bringing a white man’s drink fast enough in a downtown Baltimore bar.

Racially motivated murder of Hattie Carroll by caning. The Afro. 10 February 1963

In the 1988 story about the death of Hattie Carroll, Simon showed both his burgeoning talent for a narrative style of journalism. The man who killed Carroll for not bringing him his drink quick enough had spent the evening terrorizing the wait staff at the hotel. He called one woman a Black bitch. He also hit several people with his cane during the “Spinster’s Ball” a charity event attended by Baltimore’s society elite.

It was also perhaps Simon’s earliest recorded use of the word “nigger”. It was printed for no good reason. For that, the Baltimore Sun should apologize.

The word set in a line and paragraph all to itself.

It had no voice or quotation marks. It was David Simon’s voice caressing the word “nigger”:

David Simon, “The Case of Hattie Carroll, Baltimore Sun, 7 February 1988

The Sun really had no journalistic rationale for printing the racial epitaph gratuitously added by David Simon. The only context provided was that while visiting Charles County, the home of the man who killed Carroll, Simon supposedly witnessed the word’s wide use among whites in southern Maryland’s rural communities. Simon included in his story an unidentified white man (supposedly granted anonymity) from Charles County who wished “black people the best of everything, really.”

From that point in 1988, Simon took leave from The Baltimore Sun again and spent a year embedded with the Baltimore Police Department as its intern. His experience shadowing Baltimore Police Department (BPD) was memorialized in a 1991 book, that was later made into a television show for NBC, Homicide, Life on the Street. “Nigger” appears five times in the book; there’s no mention of “Nigga.”

Nor was [BPD] the most tolerant environment in which to come of age; there were cops twenty years younger who reacted to what they saw on the streets by crawling into a psychological cave, damning every nigger and liberal faggot to hell for screwing up the country
David Simon. Homicide A Year on the Killing Streets 1991

Simon’s “Nigger” Code

David Simon, much like the police he covered while a cops reporter in Baltimore, has somewhat of a code that dictates how he uses the word.

“Nigger” or “nigga” it seems is not something Simon feels that he say verbally out loud, in public. If he writes it out (in a tweet or essay), he is not restricted. However, he will take pause before he uses “my nigga” in writing if its directed to someone Black.

If it’s written as satire or in the voice of a persona he is co-opting, then he can pretend to be Black and use the word, but only direct it towards someone who is white.

The code allows Simon to write the word for characters to say as dialogue. He is also able to have a narrator describe someone as a nigger. Simon is the sole arbiter as to how many times he can write the word and if it is offensive. He believes his pass is unlimited.

Simon has not made any distinction between ending the word with an “r” or an “a”. But as stated earlier, his book The Corner uses “nigger” 10 times more frequently than “nigga”.

“David Simon is the blackest white man I have ever known. What he wrote was clearly ironic, and entirely at the expense of the whitest white man on the planet. I see no foul.”
Gene Weingarten, Washington Post columnist and Simon’s writing partner.

Sorry, Not Sorry

What seems most clear about Simon’s code is that he should never apologize when he uses it.

David Simon said that if he did delete the Hannity tweet he feared that in the void someone would claim that “I used the phrase to do anything other than to ironically mock someone’s actual co-opting of racial status [emphasis added] in order to advance their racist candidate.”

Let’s unpack the statement. First, he is arguing that if deleted, saved screenshots would also disappear from this known dimension thusly preventing him from pointing out the original context. Next, he insists that he was being ironic in mocking a white man who Simon believes to be racist by engaging him with a racially explosive word. In turn, no one focused on Hannity’s “co-opted racial status” but much of the world took Simon to the woodshed for his wanton use of a racist term. Now, that’s ironic.

David Simon is a Cop

David Simon is what Baltimoreans gleefully call a wannabe from the Dee Em Vee.

The Montgomery County native, 61, is mostly known as the creator of HBO’s The Wire, a fictional cop drama set and filmed on location in Baltimore. Credited for its realistic portrayal, Simon and his collaborator Ed Burns, a former city police detective captured the distinctive voice of the streets of Baltimore.

When the series debuted in June 2002, The Wire was applauded for its nuanced characters not often found in Hollywood. Simon’s narrative storytelling of Baltimore’s intricacies was compelling and layered. After its fifth and final season wrapped, the set was broken down, and the lights dimmed, all that was left behind were the tragic lives of the real people whose stories were told for profit by outsiders.

Twenty years after The Wire, Simon is back at it again with HBO, this time as the creator of We Own This City (WOTC), a fictionalized portrayal of a 2021 true crime book written by then Baltimore Sun newspaper reporter Justin Fenton also set in Baltimore. Similarly, critical acclaim was bestowed on the dialect and scenery that captures the small city with a big heart. But what is different from years that preceded The Wire are two major factors:

the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement (that includes the city’s uprising after the in-custody death of Freddie Gray in 2015)
the relevancy of social media in swaying public opinion (and subsequent cancel culture)

The lives of Blacks in the country mattered decidedly less when The Wire was greenlit, yet David Simon has not changed with the times. It is Simon’s continued public and unapologetic use of the word “nigger”, that has found the white man from the DMV himself way down deep in a hole since The Wire wrapped. When WOTC‘s controversial final episode aired on May 20, 2022, it was totally on brand that Simon dismissed concerns about his role in the post George Floyd era of policing.

Simon embeds himself within the ranks of BPD as its “intern”

Gaining access to police sources takes talent, trust, and time on the part of journalists. As does all institutions with something to hide (Catholic church, NCAA, NRA, political parties, and law enforcement come to mind), its caretakers are wary of members of the press for fear of what could be revealed. By the early 1980s the skeletons in Baltimore Police department’s closet had spilled onto the floor and were piling up in all the corners. An astute observationist like David Simon would have to be blind not to see it. Unless his promised proximity to police culture to gain their trust shaded his objectivity.

David Simon was a cop. After a few years on his journalist job, Simon took a leave of absence from The Sun and became a “police intern” at Baltimore City’s police department (BPD). He spent a year embedded within BPD learning their language and meeting their families. History has revealed that while his decision served neither journalism nor the general public of Baltimore very well, it was a huge “come up” for the beat reporter. In a book, Simon chronicled his experiences as a cop using the voice of what he called “the communal homicide detective.” Gaining unfettered access to police would prove that loss of objectivity was the price he would pay.

David Simon’s 1991 book promotion tour for “Homicide: Life on the Killing Streets” which set his path to Hollywood. The photo highlights him being “embedded” within BPD for a year to gain access to LE.

Simon looks to have made a deal with the devil. The violence against Black lives predates “police intern” Simon’s illegal stop and frisk days at BPD. The historic systemic racism that permeates BPD was documented in a scathing 2016 report by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) that includes empirical evidence of its patterns and practices of civil rights violations against Blacks. The very institution of policing is the villain in the sage of Black lives, not Simon and certainly not “drug wars”.

People who have lived in the city for generations have long memories. In the case of David Simon, people have not distinguished him from other cops when he was embedded along side them. BPD Commissioner David DeSousa in 2018 apologized at a rap concert for 200 years of racialized policing in Baltimore. Even the staid institution of The Baltimore Sun recognized its contribution to stoking racial discord when its editorial board issued an apology early this year. BPD, on the other hand unapologetically maintains its status as the most funded agency in the city at over a half a billion dollars annually.

BPD’s historical occupation over the city’s Black citizens on horrific display in Harlem Park in 2017 is in some measure owed to a young and ambitious cub reporter from the DMV who chose to be a big city cop for a year in 1988. When Freddie Gray was brutalized by officers which led to his death, Simon chided BPD for breaking the code. The resulting uprising was in Simon’s view because of failed policies he told the Marshal Project in a 2015 interview.

“I’m talking in the vernacular of cops, not my own — but even in the vernacular of what cops secretly think is fair, this is bullshit, this is a horror show. There doesn’t seem to be much code anymore.”
David Simon, on why Freddie Gray who didn’t meet the criteria should not have been beaten by BPD.

Simon’s latest venture documenting BPD culture excluded the obliteration of the code on display with the death of a Baltimore cop two years after Freddie Gray’s death. In an overtly illegal and brutal show of force, BPD locked down of over 10 square blocks in West Baltimore. The week-long occupation was covered in Fenton’s WOTC book, but quizzically excluded from Simon’s Hollywood portrayal of the GTTF.

Why Simon chose to omit actual evidence of BPD “owning the city” instead of settling for mere hyperbole has not yet been addressed. Albeit, it is not too surprising in hindsight since the police action prompting cries of #FreeWestBaltimore received precious little journalistic interest in real time. Since both the FBI and the DOJ were on site during the “lockdown” it served the feds well not to be eager to discuss BPD’s wanton display of police power. The Harlem Park lockdown is what happens when “police say” journalism takes precedent for fear of losing access.

During the lockdown/occupation, over one hundred Black residents of Harlem Park were routinely stopped by police, without any individualized suspicion of wrongdoing when they came and went from their homes. Instead in the Simon-orchestrated HBO version of history, GTTF chose to illuminate the failures and flaws of individuals like Wayne Jenkins.

The departments’ abusive actions on that day were so atrocious against residents living near the crime scene that it in response to a lawsuit, the commissioner issued a rare public apology.

[Black residents] were required to identify themselves, and their names were run through law enforcement databases. Police officers were posted at each block, alleyway, and corner, and police checkpoints were at each intersection.
ACLU Maryland

Leaving the tragedy and aftermath of the Harlem Park lockdown on the cutting room floor is one of the most cop-like acts David Simon could have ever done.

Sean Suiter as a Casualty of Simon’s Blind Spot

Lately, much of the ire directed at Simon on social media #BaltimoreTwitter centers on his depiction of the shooting death of a Black homicide detective in the line of duty that occurred in November 2017 in the Harlem Park neighborhood that preceded the lockdown. It is a case that remains unsolved. The detective, Sean Suiter, was killed the day before he was scheduled to testify as a federal witness in a corruption case involving multiple members of the department’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) plain clothes unit.

To Fenton’s credit, his reporting in WOTC depicts with clarity the extent of the BPD’s propensity for criminality and coverups, if only anecdotally. To Simon’s chagrin, because Fenton’s book maintains objectivity, but Simon’s decided to deviate from the book and go full bore just to echo a BPD’s narrative is quite telling.

Screengrab Twitter. David Simon @AoDespair

In the dramatization, Simon took creative license to underscore the scenario of suicide, a hypothesis that embraces BPD culture and dismisses journalistic responsibility. It is also in contrast to the Medical Examiner’s determination of homicide.

Fenton’s book chronicles the federal court cases involving the specialized unit he previously referred to as “elite” within the BPD which for years operated a robbery and drug ring while on duty. Before becoming a homicide detective Suiter, a native of Washington DC, was a member of GTTF.

A timeline of events that preceded Suiter’s death could be construed that he felt building pressure to snitch against his brothers in blue or that higher up in LE were seeking eliminate remaining potential threats. In October 2017, a key defendant ex-GTTFer Jemell Rayam plead guilty for his involvement in the department’s criminal conspiracy and became a witness for the prosecution. Suiter, died from a bullet wound to the head the day before he was scheduled to testify (presumably to corroborate details what Rayam offered in exchange for his cooperation).

Two weeks after Suiter’s death in early December 2017, Sgt. Thomas Allers pleaded guilty and declined to cooperate with the government. All the while Harlem Park was under police guard. The lone holdout, Wayne Jenkins finally entered his guilty plea in January 2018, the same month the trial began for two members who did not take a deal, Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor (who both were found guilty).

The circumstances involving Suiter’s death are as improbable as they are disturbing. The family man who had a reputation for professionalism was murdered in broad daylight – with what they have indicated was a department issued handgun. Suiter was discovered in a vacant lot near an alley in a section of Baltimore known for being a bastion for unsolved violent crimes. The single bullet to the head occurred while he was accompanied by another officer, who was not his usual partner.

The changing statements from that day’s partner, David Bomenka, provided the context for the collection of police evidence and the interpretation of same that followed. It is at this point the elements of a cover up (if not a conspiracy) takes root.

One independent journalist has persistently taken local media to task for merely parroting the narratives spoon-fed by BPD about proposed evidence without consideration of BPD’s history of lying and manipulation. “The media has largely accepted these prevailing myths, in part because there was a battle inside BPD over what happened to Suiter, what the Sun called the “two conflicting theories,” wrote Justine Baron on her website TheSuiterFiles.com.

Violations of Journalism 101 are many when it comes to covering Sean Suiter:

Journalists ceased amplifying the fact that when medical transport arrived, Suiter had been carried and placed inside of a patrol car (and dropped in the process) by BPD officers first to the scene. BPD said that the delay had no relevancy to the investigation.
No further investigation was made of the patrol car carrying Suiter (the driver has not been publicly identified) got into two accidents en route to the hospital.
No ownership of the decision to disturb the crime scene (and perhaps cause additional injury) and move Suiter from the lot.
Suiter’s gun, later proclaimed to be the murder weapon, was removed from the scene and recovered in a patrol car’s trunk – at some undisclosed time later, with zero explanation by BPD.
When officers responded, it was to an “active shooter” scene, in accordance with the information given by the only eyewitness, Suiter’s partner that day.

Jamie Hector’s performance as Sean Suiter earned the character a tragic figure moniker. In an episode guide, it surmises that “faced with the prospect of testifying against his fellow cops, and losing the job that he loves, he tragically commits suicide.” The suicide narrative championed by Simon and BPD has been engrained in the annals of television.

“Suiter is cynical and hopeless, faced with rejection from his colleagues if he chooses to testify and possible prosecution if he doesn’t. He also risks losing his job if, in testifying, he reveals to the FBI that he witnessed, and did nothing about, the GTTF’s crimes.”
Rebecca Bihn-Wallace, June 12, 2022 MSN.com

David Simon Crosses the Line

Simon may have left journalism, but it did not stop journalists (and others) from coming for him. Simon told the “Twitterverse” that he believed the cops when it came to the unsolved case of Sean Suiter’s death. Surveillance video of the moments that lead up to the shooting was stolen and (likely destroyed by BPD). A second camera provided grainy footage that generates more questions and the answers that it provides. Some see this action as further indication of a cover-up.

The barrage of criticism against the once-BPD “intern” turned Hollywood showrunner was swift. Suiter’s friend and attorney drew first blood:

Nice reminder that facts don’t matter when they get in the way of dramatizing crime in Baltimore
Jeremy Eldridge, Sean Suiter’s Attorney, Twitter May 30, 2022

In classic Simon fashion, he defended his position against Suiter’s attorney with the bluntness of a chainsaw in a pillow factory: “Your client took his life in advance of his grand jury testimony….he would likely lose his job as a result of the revelations forthcoming. This is regrettable. It is also entirely true,” Simon posted on Twitter.

It’s not known whether Simon intentionally tried to sound like the verbalization of a cop’s internal dialogue, but he succeeded. What Simon says is very much in line with how cops think: Suiter felt so strongly about the remote possibility of losing his job that he chose a risky attempt to portray his death as a line of duty homicide. Cops (and Simon) believe Suiter took a less than 50/50 gamble in order to provide for his family financially by hoping Bomenka fell for him staging his suicide to look like a homicide.

By any calculation a staged homicide was an unfathomable risk given that recent history has shown that many LE come out the other side of prosecutions largely unscathed. Even if after testifying Suiter ended up a disgraced former LE, he could find gainful employment as a media analyst or Baltimore drive time talk show host if not a professional police review panel member.

There’s no debate that the central evidence in the Suiter cold case is the lone eyewitness, Det. David Bomenka. He is the man that Simon has placed the utmost trust in. Simon has more faith in Bomenka than Suiter ever did. Suiter was leery enough about helping Bomenka on his case that Suiter grabbed a police radio before venturing out with the man he barely knew.

Screengrab, BWC footage of Bomenka’s approach to a felled Sean Suiter, Source IRB Report.

Homicide detectives rarely take a police issue radio, preferring to use their cell phones while in the field. If a detective wanted extra assurance when paired with a person they did not trust, then that would be a reason for carrying a radio. Sean Suiter’s last words were captured on his radio transmission. Although it’s not conclusive, it sounds as if Suiter is saying to ease someone else’s concern that he was close to: “Don’t worry about it.”

Screengrab Twitter David Simon May 31, 2022

Activist Leslie Mac asked Simon on Twitter how a former beat reporter responsible for covering BPD for years still gives credence to the version of facts presented by BPD and the FBI. Mac suggested that Simon’s white privilege clouds his judgement, Simon responded in typical fashion:

Moron, the FBI broke open the entire scandal of the GTTF. They uncovered the corruption. And the evidence of the suicide comes not from the BPD but from an independent investigator. So basically you only with to credit your own unevidenced imaginings. Got it. Christ Almighty.
David Simon @AoDespair R/T of Leslie Mac June 4, 2022 ,Twitter

Barely anyone in the city trusted BPD to investigate Suiter’s death with the exception of David Simon. Certainly no one did who was familiar with the failed prosecution the year prior of the officers present when Freddie Gray was fatally injured while in custody trusted that BPD would be respectful of West Baltimore residents. With no public confidence and lacking in overall legitimacy due to the DOJ, BPD’s leadership asked the FBI to take over the investigation and it declined, making national news.

Simon has often evoked the Independent Review Board (IRB) conclusion of suicide, without mentioning much how the IRB was bought and paid for by BPD and that members included two former BPD officers. The IRB was commissioned to look into the Harlem Park lockdown, but it failed to do so.

The DOJ’s Consent Decree’s monitoring team soon after the lockdown indicated that its job was not to investigate the lockdown: “… it is not appropriate for the Monitoring Team to interject itself into an active crime scene investigation or to assume the role of BPD command staff by intervening in BPD actions.” However, nine months later the IRB punted.

“The IRB has not analyzed this [lockdown of Harlem Park], and incorporates by reference the work of the BPD Monitoring Team,”
Report to the Commissioner of the Police Department of Baltimore City Concerning an Independent Review of the November 15,2017 Incident and Its Aftermath, August 2018

In the months that followed Suiter’s violent and suspicious death, the city was in extreme turmoil: The top cop was fired by the mayor. The person the mayor promoted to the position (Darryl DeSousa) was forced to resign after being charged for federal tax evasion. (These events depicting the dysfunction were included in the HBO portrayal). The city was failing to meet demands of the consent decree to reform its police department that it entered into after the 2015 death in police custody by Freddie Gray.

With political pressure mounting, BPD hired a panel to provide the public with an explanation of the innerworkings of their investigation. They called the panel the Independent Review Board IRB). The IRB’s processes and deliberations were conducted in private; their members were selected by BPD and they were paid by the department.

A year later, citing flaws in the IRB report (no one from the family was questioned in the process), Suiter’s family publicly decried the BPD investigation (and IRB’s review of same) as corrupt. It seemed that the thin blue line left the grieving officer’s family on the outside looking in. Suiter’s wife and children said what most of Baltimore was thinking: that whoever is responsible for the murder was within the department.

“It’s just too much of a coincidence — the day before he was due to testify. It looks like an inside job,” Sean Suiter’s eldest child, Damira, 27, said Tuesday night.
Justin Fenton, Baltimore Sun, May 1, 2019.

The medical examiner’s ruling in Suiter’s death is and always has been homicide. The state’s attorney called the case “open and pending” after BPD prematurely announced that it was closed in November 2019. Simon blames most of BPD’s abuses (but not its systemic racist practices) on the failings of drug war era policies.

In response to the backlash, David Simon has promised to outline his rationale for believing the cops’ theory of suicide in an essay.

From a white boy from the DMV to a Wannabe BPD-er

Simon’s road to Baltimore began in Silver Spring, MD and traversed through his admittedly mediocre years as a University of Maryland student in College Park. Upon graduation, he took a journalist job reporting for the Baltimore Sun and worked there for nearly 13 years before a parting of the ways in 1995.

Simon described his departure from The Sun as a result of his growing frustration of corporate influence along with editors stifling his burgeoningly creative narrative voice. As a young reporter, Simon’s strength was storytelling. He took a year leave in order to be embedded with Baltimore Police in search of more stories to tell. It was a gamble though that paid off. Director Barry Levinson (a true Baltimorean) optioned his book for a $10,000 pay day for Simon and turned it into a hit television show for NBC.

Buoyed by the success of his 1993 book Homicide: Life on The Killing Streets Simon’s request for a raise in pay at the paper was rebuffed. The Sun newspaper had had enough of David Simon. Before taking a buyout and leaving journalism for good, Simon thought the Sun would be his first and only job, he told Chicago Tribune in a 2008 article.

The then-owners of the Sun likened Simon’s hold onto a decades-old grudge to a character flaw. His anger issues, Simon said, are not directed at individuals, but towards the decline in journalism, they said in the same article. Not to worry, in 2012 Simon joined Twitter and his penchant for harvesting grudges would be on the world stage and undeniable.

Cashing in on Baltimore

David Simon’s year embedded as a reporter shadowing BPD homicide detectives was recounted in his 1991 book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.” Director Barry Levinson (also from Baltimore) optioned the book for $10,000 and it became an award-winning television show, earning him a best director Emmy in 1993 and Andre Braugher an Emmy for best actor in 1998.

HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET — Sleuth Series — Pictured: (back row l-r) Reed Diamond as Detective Mike Kellerman, Richard Belzer as Detective John Munch, Clark Johnson as Detective Meldrick Lewis, Michelle Forbes as Dr. Julianna Cox, Kyle Secor as Detective Tim Bayliss, Yaphet Kotto as Lieutenant Al Giardello, (front row l-r): Max Perlich as J. H. Brodie, Melissa Leo as Detective/Sergeant Kay Howard, Andre Braugher as Detective Frank Pembleton — Sleuth Photo

The Baltimore-based Hollywood successes linked to Simon’s stint as what amounts to a junior cop is as follows:

Homicide Life on The Streets (1993)
The Corner (2000)
The Wire (2002)
We Own This City (2022)

Like The Wire, WOTC is just a television show. Where they differ is that The Wire was loosely based on real people but was clearly a fictionalized representation. WOTC is a true story. Real people, suffering families, and the ongoing trauma of Blacks in the city, especially West Baltimore is not a figment of anyone’s imagination.

The Trouble With Outsiders

Granted, a great amount of not liking Simon is strictly personal, and not about his business at all. Objectively, Simon is largely viewed as a disagreeable and crass human being. (Simon was banned from Twitter for a death threat in 2018). His delight is visceral when he blocks people from viewing his Twitter account while insulting their intelligence for disagreeing with him. His admitted favorite insults lobbied at people are asshole, idiot, moron, scrotesniff, fuckbonnet, taintlick, and gibbering submoron.

Simon, in the post Trump years, still also manages to squeeze in an occasional motherfucker or nigger (more on Simon’s use of “nigger” in this series’ next installment).

That Simon is from the DMV instead of from Baltimore some may believe is at the crux of the disdain he evokes from locals. They would be wrong, mostly. People are growing weary of Simon because he has not atoned for having some of the city’s most dangerous cops as friends.

One such case highlighted in the book that launched Simon’s career stemmed from when he had extraordinary access to LE. It included the conviction of three Black teenagers for killing Dewitt Duckett over a Georgetown basketball jacket inside of Harlem Park Junior High in 1983. All three teens were exonerated in November 2019 after serving 36 years in prison, aided by the MidAtlantic Innocence Project which found the BPD coerced witnesses into testifying that they saw the three boys fighting with Duckett. If Simon knew about this coercion, he never spoke of it.

Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Charles J. Peters declared Alfred Chestnut, Ransom Watkins and Andrew Stewart (pictured below) all innocent and issued an apology on behalf of the entire criminal justice system.

No one would be surprised at all if Simon purchased the rights to the story of the three Black teens from Harlem Park wrongfully arrested, prosecuted and incarcerated before being exonerated. According to HBO, David Simon is the preeminent voice suited to tell the most tragic of Baltimore’s stories.

BALTIMORE, MD – NOVEMBER 25: Mary Stewart, left, walks with her son, Andrew Stewart and her daughter, Ulonda Stewart, Andrew’s sister after he along with Alfred Chestnut and Ransom Watkins were released and exonerated for the 1983 murder they were convicted of on Monday November 25, 2019 in Baltimore, MD. The three were given life sentences for the murder of DeWitt Duckett. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

NEXT UP IN THIS SERIES: David Simon’s Love of the “N-Word”

The Making of an Abolitionist

To say Baltimore’s wealthiest financier Johns Hopkins has been the beneficiary of good press for over 200 years would be like saying there was some media curiosity in the OJ Simpson verdict.

For over 200 years Maryland’s native son Johns Hopkins absolutely could do no wrong, that is if you are to believe the local papers. Acknowledgement of the man’s moral failures came 147 years after his death when Johns Hopkins University finally got around to announcing that they looked at documents in the public sphere for well over a century.

The University’s president in December 2020 to much fanfare announced publicly that its founder was an enslaver, and not likely the exalted abolitionist as he was often hailed by the university.

Baltimore Sun, a collaborator on the PR campaign that cast Hopkins as an abolitionist, here publishes a retrospective on the man and his institutions upon the centennial occasion of the university. 22 February 1976.

Aloof indeed. Hopkins has enjoyed all the gravitas that a port town with a steady loss in population could muster. A combination of blood memory and a dedication to the oral tradition have kept Blacks ever vigilant against the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

One would be hard pressed to find a Black Baltimorean who was caught off guard when the University announced in December 2020 that the eccentric millionaire Johns Hopkins, who died in 1873, enslaved people for financial benefit over a large span of his lifetime.

Moreover, with JHU’s confession about Hopkins’ active participation in the slave trade, one could safely assume that fellow Marylanders Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass and Harriett Tubman began to rest a little more peacefully. The risks and efforts of all three Black abolitionists should have never been aligned with the caustic millionaire and railroad baron’s name as fellow abolitionists to begin with.

Had Hopkins really been a “friend to Blacks,” as the preeminent financier of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, with minimal effort he could have single-handedly usurped the dangers (or need for) the life-threatening trek that necessitated the underground railroad.

In order to dispel the rumor and confirm facts regarding Hopkins’ stance, settling on the definition of abolitionist, beyond a person who supported an end to slavery, is paramount. Noted abolitionist and fellow Marylander Frederick Douglass traveled and gave speeches in support of emancipation before the war (Hopkins gave no speeches and very few of his letters have been archived). After the war and during reconstruction, abolitionists sought federal legislation to ensure equal rights regardless of race or gender as women’s suffrage movement took on steam. Hopkins provided no public testimony on pivotal Constitutional Amendments or provided a published stance on women’s rights.

If Johns Hopkins were an abolitionist, he must have proclaimed his allegiance to freedom and humanity ever so quietly under his breath in an overly ornate room (that would make a Quaker blush) in one of his multiple Baltimore mansions in a toast to himself with wine poured into the finest crystal by one of his many Black servants at his beck and call whom he had previously enslaved before emancipation.

The Darkies Were Happily Working Hard, Then They Were Gone

Much of what is known about Hopkins’ personal life and political leanings is through the sole definitive biography written by his brother’s granddaughter Helen Hopkins Thom and published in 1929 to little fanfare. It this book that planted the seed out of which the myth of Hopkins as a sympathetic abolitionist would grow.

In the introduction to the 2009 edition of Thom’s book, James Stimpert, Archivist of Johns Hopkins’ Sheridan Libraries warns that personal bias drips from her pages. “The historian will recognize that a narrative based on personal recollection may be suspect, both from a factual as well as an interpretive standpoint,” he wrote. No other definitive biography exists. Hopkins left no “paper trail” for historians to affirm or refute Thoms’ tales.

Advertisement. The Evening Sun. Baltimore 15 October 1929

Stimpert makes a couple of corrections with the benefit of hindsight and technology to Thoms’ account mostly concerned about the impetus for Hopkins’ idea to fund the university and hospital. Stimpert when given the the opportunity to delve deeper, he gave no insight or mention to the veracity of Thom’s abolitionist claim. In 2009, Stimpert had the opportunity to correct the record, point out the census data, and verify Hopkins’ allegiances to the union. What Stimpert displays is the “generational institutional ignorance” according to the Washington Post that runs rampant within the hallowed halls of the country’s first research institution that led up to its “stunning admission.”

1820 U S Census; Census Place: District 2, Baltimore, Maryland From Ancestry.com

Never in dispute to the origin story was that Johns Hopkins was raised on a Maryland tobacco plantation where his father carried on the family business as a multi-generational enslaver. Considering that the reverberations from the abolitionist movement drastically upended the young innocent life of an adolescent Johns Hopkins, as his biographer wrote, one would find it difficult to believe that he would make the same decision to manumit his slave as his father, if given the chance.

“Free the slaves? Terrible would be the consequences of such and act! Boys taken from school to work on the plantations! Hard physical labor for the entire families accustomed to ease and leisure! To manumit the slaves in whom large sums of money had been invested, and let them go without compensation -that way lay Ruin!”
Helen Hopkins Thom, on the “hard and perplexing problem” the Hopkins family faced in her book Johns Hopkins, A Silhouette, 1929

Most curious is how the story persists that Johns’ alleged abolitionist leanings supposedly stemmed from his faith. No documents have been presented that indicate Johns gave two hoots about the Quakers. He mentioned nothing in his will about them. Instead, Thom goes to great length in describing how Johns looked down on people who cited their faith when declining wine or drink that he offered. Often he bullied guests into submission. More evidence exists that he had animosity towards the church and his father’s moral compass rather than what exists to support he sought its guidance or echoed the beliefs.

At the threat of being separated from their church, Johns’s father Samuel acquiesced to the edict that their Quaker faith no longer condoned slavery. Samuel manumitted many of the people he enslaved, but only after he could not delay the decision any longer. Samuel feared being ostracized by many of his parents’ friends and neighbors who ran tobacco plantations and household with enslaved labor and he worried day and night over the decision.

“Who would till the fields and harvest the crops when the slaves were gone? Who would card the wool and the cotton, do the weaving in the weaving-house, and keep the spinning wheels humming with the gentle burr that daily filled the air?”
Helen Hopkins Thom, author of Johns Hopkins A Silhouette

While no actual number has been provided, Thom noted that Johns’ parents Samuel and Hannah owned “plenty of slaves” and their labor was not just in the tobacco fields. The subjugation of people based on their skin color was also necessary in order for the most pious of Quakers to receive round-the-clock care for their 11 children. Thom embraces the pastoral imagery of forced labor plantations and evokes nostalgia for days gone by:

“Five hundred acres of long green tobacco plants formed the background for the unpretentious bring house, the large bards, and the laves’ quarters, a group of log cabins, usually surrounded by pickaninnies and old mammies while the more able-bodied negroes were busy in the fields.”
Helen Hopkins Thom, author of Johns Hopkins A Silhouette

Johns’ father Samuel died at age 55, about five years after penning the manumissions. Even though, his adult sons became enslavers. According to the 1840 census both his older brother Joseph Janney Hopkins (Thoms’ grandfather) enslaved 31 people and Johns’ younger brother Philip H Hopkins enslaved 29. Another brother Samuel S Hopkins Jr inherited slaves from his father, who he later manumitted.

Johnsey Hopkins, as he was known, is depicted on 1820 census as the enslaver of four people. As Johnse on the 1830 census he is documented as as enslaving two people while having three free Black males in his household. On the 1840 census in Baltimore, he is shown as an enslaver of three males. On the 1850 census, he had one enslaved individual. It would be difficult sell marketing oneself as abolitionist over the course of three decades of enslaving bodies, best to let others do the heavy lifting.

The Making of a Myth

The Washington Post admitted that the mythology surround Johns Hopkins being an abolitionist was built on “scant evidence” then fails to elaborate much further.

Equally incredulous, JHU president Ron Daniels acknowledged that a research institution with the motto of “The Truth Will Set You Free” failed to closely examine at evidence that had for over a century been in plain view: “How did we embrace this so readily?” Daniels said as reported by the Post.

Asking the protectors of the fourth estate to conduct a postmortem on how such easily obtainable facts escaped their watchful eye is not unlike what one would get after asking law enforcement to suggest ways to reform police. This independent journalist’s obligation is only towards the ancestors and is guided by what’s in the record, what’s been left out and a questioning of the gatekeepers. Historical whitewashing by higher education and journalistic institutions under the guise of a a narrow definition of scholarship and free speech must end without delay.

Historians are not faring that much better when it comes to fence-sitting. Dr. Martha Jones, a Black woman heading Hopkins’ initiative to finally speak truth to power says about Hopkins in the Post article:

“He may have been a critic of slavery,” Jones said. “My initial observation is that more than one thing can be true at the same time, and was true for many individuals in the early United States.”
Martha Jones, PhD From Washington Post in Dec 2020 on whether Hopkins was both an abolitionist and an enslaver. She’s spearheading the “reckoning” and in 2022 admits her perspective is evolving.

Overreliance upon Thoms’ book provided cover for the abolitionist myth to thrive in the public domain. Dr. Jones’ curiously-named Hard Histories Project vows to examine “the role that racism and discrimination have played at Johns Hopkins” by engaging communities “in a frank and informed exploration of how racism has been produced and permitted to persist as part of our structure and our practice.”

Not uncoincidentally, the public relations use of Hopkins as an abolitionist has undoubtedly provided cover for Hopkins’ running roughshod over Black neighborhoods and scores of Black bodies like Henrietta Lacks. Maintaining a facade of being a friend to Blacks in the city was crucial in maintaining the steady from of obscene dollar amounts of government funding for research, not to mention how attractive it looked when seeking endowment contributions.

Dr. Jones’s leadership is needed on the manner in which the prolonged public relations campaign that feigned Hopkins’ abolitionist roots served the University financially if the reckoning includes a necessary and larger discussion about reparations for the community it exploited.

What follows below is a synopsis of what may be considered kernels of truth from Thom’s book that later morphed into a mythological creature that has financially benefited the institutions named in his honor:

MYTH: Hopkins as a confirmed bachelor forever mourning the love that was denied him by his uncle’s devotion to his faith never again looked for love. His love for the institutions would take over that place in his heart.

THOM: Hopkins had “affairs” of the heart and enjoyed the company of several women, but although he came close to a proposal, he never married. He feared failure and worried if he could remain faithful. Instead, he focused his on a maniacal quest to accumulate money, real estate, power, and to create an institutional legacy that would not fail him. Admittedly, his first love was his cousin, an ill-fated relationship that he often lamented its demise due to his uncle’s disapproval.

MYTH: Johns Hopkins was a friend to Black Marylanders. Hopkins’ proximity to the economic struggles of suffering Baltimoreans has provided them with a steady stream of government funding.

THOM: Jim, the “faithful darkey” who often brought Johns his slippers and dressing gown was remembered in Johns’ will with a house on French St and $5, 000. A Black servant Charles was left $2000 while a third, Chloe, the cook, was left $1000.

REALITY: Johns Hopkins was friendly to a few Blacks, most of those he owned as their enslaver at one point.

MYTH: Johns Hopkins was an abolitionist.

THOM: The days of “ease and plenty” came to an abrupt end for him; Johns, barely 10 years old was called to work on the farm and care for his younger sibling. The family’s loss of slave labor when he was a child wore heavily on Johns throughout his adult life.

THOM (also): [Johns Hopkins’] stood by the union, was a strong Abilitionist [sic] and his outspoken principles made him many enemies…]

REALITY: If Johns Hopkins ever thought fondly about the abolitionist movement that was in full swing over much of his adult life, he thought it best to take it with him to his grave.

When Fact Checking is a Bridge Too Far

Finding when a rumor starts is not always as important as who and when it was repeated. In the Post article, no blame or shame was expressed on how (or why) corporate journalists parroted the abolitionist fable for centuries. Outside of Thom’s sentimental remembrances, the earliest mention of Johns Hopkins being anything close to an abolitionist was a portrayal of someone who favored Lincoln’s desire to preserve the union, which is not identical to being an abolitionist.

What might be the first published echoing on a sentiment that went unfactchecked could be an Associated Press article published in the Washington Post.

(1973) During the Richard Nixon administration, the Post published an obituary of Hopkins’ great niece from the Associated Press wire who called her great uncle: “an ardent abolitionist and assisted many blacks.”

(1989) When Maryland’s Light Rail System was being planned, Evening Sun columnist Peter Kumpa wrote hardly anything is known about Johns Hopkins, but wrote that during the Civil War Hopkins “remained a strong Unionist and abolitionist”. On the same day, the same paper’s editorial on “Medical centennial” refers to the hospital’s founder as a “intellectually unsophisticated man” refraining from bestowing any greatness to him personally other than achieving wealth.

The erroneous mentioning’s are numerous, and the effects are far reaching:

Sam Mollin, student body president at Hopkins from Washington Post Dec 9, 2020

The 200 years that Johns Hopkins, the man, has gone without scrutiny pales in comparison to the laissez-fairer approach local papers have had towards the institutions that bear his name. Much of the destruction Johns Hopkins Hospital has been able to inflict upon Blacks in Baltimore can be directly attributed to the exalted press not willing to ask the obvious questions.

Blacks have had only themselves to carry on the caution against exploitation of Black bodies that occurred within the hallowed halls of Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School. Now that the hood has been lifted, might the sun’s rays reach into the private institutions’ documentation of medical experimentation?

RESOURCES

1820 United States Federal Census. Johnsey Hopkins. 1820 U S Census; Census Place: District 2, Baltimore, Maryland; Page: 234; NARA Roll: M33_41; Image: 121. Ancestry.com Operations, Inc. 2010.

1830 United States Federal Census. Johnse Hopkins. 1830 Census Place: District 2, Baltimore, Maryland; Series: M19; Roll: 55; Page: 64; Family History Library Film: 0013178. Ancestry.com Operations, Inc. 2010.

1840 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Joseph Hopkins. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010.

Anderson, Nick, Lauren Lumpkin and Susan Svrluga. Johns Hopkins, benefactor of namesake hospital and university, was an enslaver. Washington Post. 9 Dec 2020 . Link

Bready, James H. Spirited search for the ultimate Maryland bottle. Baltimore Sun. 7 March 2004. Newspapers.com

Brown George W. Letter to John A. Andrew, Gov of Massachusetts. Delaware State Journal. 23 April 1861. Newspapers. com

“Century One at Johns Hopkins.” Editorial. The Evening Sun. 19 Feb 1976. Newspapers.com
Dibell, Kathie. Associated Press. Johns Hopkins Marks Its 75th Anniversary. The Daily Times. 15 May 1964. Newspapers.com

Kumpa, Peter. “He put us on the map, but we hardly know him. The Evening Sun.5 June 1989.

Thom, Helen Hopkins. “Johns Hopkins A Silhouette.” The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1929.

Dear Apologetic Racists: Call out racism today and save tomorrow’s apology

When someone apologizes for a lengthy and horrid past of appalling racist behaviors, as did the editorial staff at the Baltimore Sun newspaper recently, it simply begs the question of when they actually stopped being racist.

In a full-page mea culpa published in the paper on Sunday February 20, 2022, the Sun editorial staff explained in their view, they have been and honorable and service-oriented journalistic institution over much of their 185-year history. (Please clap) The editors insisted that there must be recognition for the Sun providing light for ~~all~~ [white people].

After a healthy amount of self-aggrandizing about their “important role” of “uncovering corruption” and “enlightening communities”, the Sun’s editorial board ultimately apologized for the paper’s role in the oppression of Blacks “for decades.” On occasion, the Board would have us believe, they stumbled into a vat of white supremacy leanings, and for that, they want Blacks to know, they are truly sorry.

If they wanted to demonstrate their grasp of how white supremacy works, the Apology would have recognized that their actions over centuries, (not decades as they admitted) stymied the aspirations of the entire United States of America.

This writer’s response is not to interrogate ad nauseum whether the Apology is sincere, sufficient (it isn’t) or whether it missed the mark altogether. Instead, what follows is an assessment of the editorial board’s lack of understanding of the philosophical and practical aspects of white supremacy, and its insidious nature. In doing so, this response is designed to illuminate how an apology too long delayed is an apology denied.

“The Sun sharpened, preserved and furthered the structural racism that still subjugates Black Marylanders in our communities today.”
From “We are deeply and profoundly sorry: For decades, The Baltimore sun promoted policies that oppressed Black Marylanders; we are working to make amends” Baltimore Sun editorial staff’s online Apology February 18, 2022

Any conversation about the ethics of US journalism or literally anything concerning Baltimore must begin with a discussion about racism. The Apology has many shortcomings and oversights worth addressing, but this particular response largely focuses on two specifics: first, the editors failed to with any earnestness address how today’s editorial decisions are tainted by its ongoing and current culture of white supremacy. (To clarify the Sun’s actions were not merely across decades but occurred over the course of two centuries.)

Secondly, before there can be any reconciliation between the paper and the larger community of the human race (clearly not just Blacks were injured by their actions) they have to confront some extremely hard truths that involve the man who could be called the H. L. Mencken of our times, Sir Lord of Potty Mouth Misogynistic Twitter rants David Simon, creator of HBO’s “The Wire”.

There is no honor in apologizing generations after the death of a man once his private diaries revealed him to wedded to principles of white supremacy. How long must the country wait until there is enough cover for the Sun to disavow Simon’s public embrace of the most horrible word used to subjugate and perpetuate racial division?

David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter
and general curmudgeon, on Twitter daily

H. L. Mencken, former Baltimore Sun reporter
and general curmudgeon, deceased

In the beginning, there were racists

If ethical qualms about racist people running a city’s newspaper of record would shutter doors, there would not be a paper in the entire United States. Racism is coded in the country’s DNA. The Sun’s editors traced its racist heritage back to the paper’s 19th century founder Arunah S. Abell. Abell created the paper and immediately began stoking “the fear and anxiety of white readers with stereotypes and caricatures that reinforced their erroneous beliefs about Black Americans,” wrote the editorial Board.

Also, as in accordance with American tradition, the proud white supremacist passed along his views to his children. The heirs worked in various aspects of the paper up to eventual leadership positions creating generational wealth by oppressing generations of Blacks. The Abell family’s control of the Sun papers lasted for 150 years, and its influence continues until this day.

“[Edwin F. Abell] was regarded as a safe and steadfast champion of the South’s inherited rights, her best traditions and material welfare”
From Baltimore It’s History and It’s People, Clayton Coleman Hall, 1912

Both sons, Edwin F. and George W, steered the mantle of the growing publishing behemoth to reach across the globe with foreign bureaus. There’s money in upholding white supremacy. It seems that Maryland’s unique positioning as a border between freedom and involuntary servitude coupled with Baltimore’s growing Black population was an especially lucrative position to hold.

“The Sun’s bigotry hurt its business”
From The Apology, Baltimore Sun editorial Board February 20, 2022

The 150-year period of family control over the privately-run paper was more than enough time to secure the generational wealth to the A. S. Abell family. By 1986, Sun was sold to the Times Mirror group for $600 million (a value of $926 million today).

White-washing the stain of white supremacy

Turns out a century is more than enough time to turn a penny paper into a near billion-dollar money making machine. Doing so while simultaneously cementing within the Sun a culture adhering to the basic tenants of white supremacy was most likely an unintended consequence. In preparation for the Apology, the editors should have read “How to be an Anti-Racist” by Ibram X Kendi and “White Fragility” by Robin Diangelo.

As the Board noted, the Sun’s hiring practices are atrocious for a predominately Black city. Regrettably, the Sun did not include an announcement to “go a different direction” with its leadership. Had its publisher and editor-in-chief since 2016, Trif Alatzas decided that coinciding with the Apology – now was the time to spend more time with his family – the paper would have garnered some goodwill points towards revealing hard truths.

The past Is not dead. It’s not even past

Consistently carrying the water for white supremacy leaves a stain as indelible as indigo ink on freshly picked cotton. Some of the paper’s most blatant racist actions in the 19th and 20th century were enumerated in the Apology for the world to see:

Advertising rewards offered for returning back to their enslaver people seeking freedom
Advocating the prevention of Black citizens to vote
Advocating keeping neighborhoods racially segregated “redlining”
Not hiring a Black reporter until the 1950s (and too few ever since)
Ignoring multiple and frantic calls to address police brutality spanning generations

“The paper’s prejudice hurt people…it hurt the nation as a whole by prolonging and propagating the notion that the color of someone’s skin has anything to do with their potential or their worth to the wider world.”
From The Apology, The Baltimore Sun Editorial board February 20, 2022

Mencken with children of the Johnson family in Booth Street. 1929

The venerable Henry L. Mencken was an author, Sun reporter, columnist and editor and also a well-known racist and vocal supporter of Johns Hopkins Hospital’s eugenics programs that included forced sterilization of lower-class women and incarcerated men.

Necessary Truths

The “profound” apology (for which they are “deeply ashamed” specifies incidents from the past with consequences that reverberate to the present. The editors catalogued much of its wrongdoing that occurred between the 1857 Dred Scott Decision through Mencken’s racist reign and up until it lambasted political correctness in the 1950s for denying that the atrocious Birth of a Nation movie simply depicted the sentiments of its time.

“The Baltimore Sun frequently employed prejudice as a tool of the times.” The most recent event mentioned was a 2002 editorial dismissing the qualifications of Michael Steele, a candidate for Lt. Governor beyond simply being a token Black man.

Omnipresence of white supremacy

Recognizing racist behavior, for many has become the relatively easy part in wake of the murder of George Floyd. However, dismantling systems of white supremacy is really hard work, and the Sun has a long road ahead. Grappling with dismantling apartheid systems, South Africa gave the world a lesson in the way forward: exhaustively recognize specific truths and then foster pathways that would permit reconciliation.

In 2022, as the influence of newspapers are at record lows and the Sun’s finances are in dire straits, the Sun outlined their regrets and offered a way forward. The paper demonstrated its commitment by “atoning for the paper’s past wrongs regarding race” with a bulleted list of action item which include:

Lauch a reporting team to tell more Black stories
Establish a community engagement committee
Build a database of sources that could be called upon to diversify voices
Hire fewer white people and more “people of color”

Mere hours after its Apology, the Sun announced a about a half dozen new hires. The goodwill garnered by the Apology was immediately tempered by an exchange on social media:

Screen grab from Twitter on February 26, 2022

Denouncing David Simon as the way forward

There’s likely no correlation (certainly none that could be proven) between two Maryland events: H.L. Mencken’s death in January 1956 and David Simon’s birth in February 1960, but that’s no reason to refrain from making the argument that Simon is more likely than not, Mencken reincarnated.

Sealed until 25 years after he died, the contents of Mencken’s diary published in 1989 was discovered to be filled with hate speech that included anti-sematic rants that shocked even his closest friends who immediately distanced themselves from him. Many spoke openly about their disdain: ″The diaries are almost sick. I mean he hated everybody,″ said Gwinn Owens, a former editor and columnist on The Evening Sun whose father, Hamilton Owens, was a long-time Sunpapers editor and friend of Mencken’s, as reported by the Associate Press.

“… it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment to a colored woman. They are all essentially child-like, and even hard experience does not teach them anything.″
From Menken’s diary, dated September 1943

The Sun’s response was to back Mencken as being colorful curmudgeon and double down by immortalizing his words by placing a colorful quote on the wall of the newsroom. The desicion to ride or die with Menken is a clear reflection of how entrenched white supremacy’s roots were dug in deep at the Sun. In the Apology, the Sun reiterated the numerous times they could have recognized or distanced themselves from Mencken and for that they apologized.

No one comes close to Mencken’s legendary status at the Sun. David Simon although has surpassed him. The creator of HBO’s critically acclaimed show The Wire has elevated Simon into the pantheon of television greats. He prefers to his misogynistic and crude comments to be enjoyed during his lifetime and posts frequently on social media and not privately in a diary.

Simon joined the Sun in 1983. By 1988 the young reporter had spent a year embedded within the notoriously corrupt Baltimore City Police department. His experience led to the publishing of his book, “Homicide, A Year on the Killing Streets.” The book and subsequent Hollywood productions catapulted David Simon to the rarefied air that in his mind apparently allows him to use the most profane and racist word known to Blacks.

The young reporter was granted unprecedented access to Baltimore police. One could only imagine just what it took for Simon, a truth-seeking journalist, to be able to forge a bond of trust with various members of a department known for its secrecy due to its over- reliance upon unconstitutional and racist behaviors. It’s worth noting that no exposé of police wrongdoings surfaced as a result of his “investigative reporting”. A few police officers were given acting roles on Simon’s Hollywood projects though.

With the city reeling because of the ineptitude of the police department at a annual price tag of half billion dollars, some have wondered what role Simon’s work has had on the city’s notable violent nature since he came on board The Sun. In January 2022, Lara Bazelon wrote about the numerous misconduct lawsuits against many of the men Simon cozied up to for New York Magazine.

The Sun should have been first to that story, but it is not too late for them to examine how “elite” officers become “untouchable.” If sincerity is at the heart of the Apology, then addressing the contributions David Simon has had as an embedded reporter to the bullet proof cover the department has enjoyed in avoiding accountability would be a clear indication of their intentions.

If the Sun were to speak hard truths to and about David Simon, it would certainly put a crack in the foundation of white supremacy that the Sun is built upon.

Twitter suspended Simon. Many have taken public stands against his language on social media. The Sun can begin atoning for the sins of its father and finally exorcise the ghosts of A. S. Abell by breaking its silence. Editors need only to summon the brashness and evoke the spirit of Mencken himself and speak truth to the powerful David Simon.

Unearthing Johns Hopkins, The Enslaver of Baltimore’s Darker Brothers

Quiet as it is kept, prior to emancipation wealthy white Baltimoreans going by the name of Johns Hopkins did not roam the town’s waterfront in numbers that would rival the city’s famed wharf rats.

Arguably no name is more well-known in Baltimore than Johns Hopkins other than perhaps Francis Scott Key or Edgar Allen Poe. Much of his staying power is due to the sprawling medical system that carries the name of its benefactor.

As a Black child and product of Baltimore public schools from K-12, I was under the firm belief that the famed Johns Hopkins was an abolitionist and friend to us Blacks. Although Baltimorean Thurgood Marshall recently had successfully argued before the US Supreme Court that separate schools based on race was not equal, children in underserved communities like me in West Baltimore house projects of McCulloh Homes were being taught to revere Hopkins as much as President Abraham Lincoln.

School photo of author as a student in West Baltimore’s The Historic Samuel Coleridge Taylor Elementary School. Circa 1972

As an adult, the depths of my miseducation (again) slapped me out of complacency in May 2019 when my independent research revealed that thee savior of crippled and orphaned highly melanated child residents of the city (Johns Hopkins) owned four black men as slaves. Third grade me would have been shook. Hopkins at this time continued the lie that Hopkins was an abolitionist.

All Hail #BaltimoreTwitter

As would any savvy intellectual do in the age of Al Gore’s Internet, I took my concerns about the veracity of the federal census (that conflicted with my years of learned yet divested public school education) to social media for validation. Even though “Johns” as a given name is odd, my small sphere of #BaltimoreTwitter concluded it was not unique within the larger Hopkins family.

Screen grab of social media conversation in May 2019 that set off a month’s-long investigation that proved Johns Hopkins enslaved people months before the JHU administration copped to his activities.

Whether the Johns Hopkins I located on the 1850 census who self-identified as an enslaver was the same financial director of B & O railroad or some lowly cousin still needed to be proven. The confusion began with a Quaker/farmer born in 1720 on an Anne Arundel County planation named Johns Hopkins Sr. Because of his success, the family patriarch (and “our” Johns’ grandfather), others in his family lionized his name. The adoration was well earned as elder Hopkins lorded over 500 acres of Anne Arundel County land (gifted by British land barons) using the blood and sweat of generations of enslaved Africans, just as his father before him had done.

Descendants, owing much of their inherited fortune and privilege to the immoral use of slave labor (and continued oppression of human rights that continues today) embraced the name and seemingly his white supremacist beliefs. When Hopkins Sr died in 1783, he left the largess of his estate to be split equally between his two oldest sons. Millionaire extraordinaire Johns’ father Samuel Hopkins who inherited half of elders’ riches was a reluctant Quaker and an enthusiastic slave owner as well.

Screenshot of a twitter conversation on the significance of my uncovering that Johns Hopkins himself owned people as slaves in addition to close members of his family. — Screengrab of continued twitter conversation dated May 8, 2019 on the significance of my uncovering that Johns Hopkins himself owned people as slaves in addition to close members of his family.

Hypothetically speaking, the slave owner named Johns Hopkins that I found on the census record could have been a cousin, nephew, uncle or anyone else but the namesake of the city’s most heralded of institutions. But it was him. The abolitionist who corresponded with President Abraham Lincoln owned men, women, and children as slaves.

Timeline of Discovery

As a genealogist, I spent nearly the better part of eight months and hundreds of hours in 2019 creating a definitive Hopkins family tree starting with his grandparents. I concluded that there was only one other man named Johns Hopkins in his family living in Maryland in both 1810 and 1820. It was his uncle Johns Hopkins Jr, who was a Quaker/slave owner who moved to Philadelphia, but there were no other adults in his family with that name living in Maryland in the forty years between 1830 and 1860.

Johns Hopkins, son of Samuel and Hannah and grandson of Johns Hopkins, Sr who took the surname of his mother Margaret Johns as his given name.

In May 2019, I was convinced that the evidence I gathered was a “historical find” and reached out to two historians who encouraged my research. Both scholars I confided in had written biographies of two of Maryland’s most baddass women: Dr. Joseph R. Fitzgerald, on Civil Rights activist Gloria Richardson leader of the Cambridge Movement (author of The Struggle is Eternal) and Dr. Kate Clifford Larson on Harriet Tubman (author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero). The authors, as one might expect, are both baddasses in my book.

The photographs below are from the Maryland Room at Enoch Pratt library taken in June 2019.

Hopkins alumni magazine that describes the founder as an abolitionist
Sources that aided in confirming genealogy of Johns Hopkins
Harriet Lane buildings that housed Black children in accordance with Hopkins’ will.
Hopkins’ will provided for the university, the hospital and a much maligned “Negro” children’s asylum
Baltimore’s laissez-fair attitude towards Hopkins’ secret research labs stoked fear in Blacks in becoming human guinea pigs.

By fall of 2019, I had firmly documented my findings that Johns Hopkins was a slave holder using genealogy and records from Enoch Pratt Library and the Maryland State Archives. Although I began in earnest uncovering just how my miseducation was so complete that a skeptical Black journalist and graduate of an HBCU was duped. Besides Dr. Fitzgerald and Dr. Clifford- Larson, I confided in the significance of my research with a few close friends and family and archivists at the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis.

Once the issue of slave owner was decided, I began looking into the secret nature of the private hospital, the associated the scandals, and just why Black people feared being snatched from the streets and taken to the hospital for medical experimentation. The pursuit of my book: Johns Hopkins: The Body Snatcher Hospital seemed more important than resurrecting a dead man who took with him to his grave how the most prominent member of a family of generational enslavers would become known as an abolitionist.

When the 2020 new year arrived bringing with it a failed coup attempt upon the US Capital by emboldened white nationalists, a virus pandemic racing the globe, and a cross country move from Maryland to California, much of my attention was diverted from Hopkins’ shady dealings. By Black Lives Matter summer in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I resumed writing chapters for my book on Hopkins’ closeted medical experiments using Blacks as guinea pigs.

In July 2020, I emailed the archivist at Johns Hopkins University with questions about Hopkins’ will.

email Correspondence between myself and James Stimpert, archivist at JHU dated July 13, 2020, months prior to JHU’s announcement.

In December 2020, John Hopkins University president Ron Daniels took me to school.
In a Washington Post article with the headline “Johns Hopkins, benefactor of namesake hospital and university, was an enslaver”, Daniels cited the exact same census I unearthed and announced to the public the conclusion I arrived at nearly 18 months earlier – Johns Hopkins financed The Baltimore and Ohio rail line, and thwarted Tubman’s underground railroad.

The Hopkins elite’s delayed acceptance of available data that existed in the public sphere for over 150 years spurred me to delve deeper into what could possibly be one of Maryland’s greatest scandals.

Next up: Catherine Pugh’s fall from grace in what would be known as the Healthy Holly scandal set the wheels in motion for the biggest expose in the state’s slave owning history. #HardHistory

”I came across the banker Johns Hopkins. So, they were slaveowner, right?”
A journalist’s interpretation of 1850 slave census for Johns Hopkins in a May 2019 Twitter conversation

When you can’t trust the police…

Prologue: In a city where the tally of unsolved murders reach the triple digits each year, it is still surprising when a homicide detective’s murder becomes a cold case in Baltimore City.

The November 2017 broad daylight shooting death of detective Sean Suiter in a residential neighborhood has reached its third anniversary. The one sketchy suspect description was quickly recanted by the one eyewitness (also a detective).

With each passing year, it looks more probable (and not just possible) that Suiter was lured to Bennett Place, trapped in the alley, put down like a dog in the street, and the crime scene (held by police for an abnormally extended time period) was staged to look like a suicide.

A bombshell press conference by Suiter’s grieving family broke through the typical blue wall of silence in May 2019 when they claimed that the 39-year old’s murder was an inside job. This occurred on the heels of the department pledging to investigate itself when it brought in a panel called the “Independent Review Board” (IRB) to review their casefiles and in their 2018 report arrived at a manner of death different that the coroner (suicide versus homicide).

To be clear, the Suiter family believes Baltimore police was involved in the murder of one of their own, and they are not alone.

Cops controlled the narrative and the neighborhood

Controlling the narrative about the possibility of Suiter being shot with his own service weapon that allegedly was found under his body was equally as important as controlling movement in and around the crime scene around the clock for days on end.

A sober look at the case reveals much of what local media outlets have “reported” is merely a regurgitation of Baltimore Police spin. Consider the source: maybe, just maybe, the department could be frantically covering up a murder, making it prudent for professional journalists to take what law enforcement said (and probably more important what they haven’t said) with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Coverage of the Sean Suiter homicide began with widely reported misinformation that he was shot as he knocked on doors following up on a year old triple murder in the west Baltimore community of Harlem Park. The public later learned that he was likely confronted in the alley (and not the lot) and that he was assisting another junior homicide detective (David Bomenka) with his murder case that happened just weeks prior.

Unfounded Accusation #1: Suiter was shot with his own gun.

Truth: That is pure speculation on four crucial fronts:

BPD (poorly) reenacted the “discovery” of the bullet that they said killed him. This happened in front of cameras by members of the homicide unit after the crime scene unit had released the area coming up empty after digging in the exact same spot looking for other missing bullets. NOTE: The “evidence” was too damaged to run ballistics tests to try and determine if Suiter’s gun fired that bullet. All that can be proven is that the bullet dramatically “discovered” at the scene is the same type that is used by BPD. It is not hyperbole to state that Baltimore Police have made an artform out of planting evidence.

Screengrab of a local television station’s cameras that captured BPD “discovery” of the bullet that killed Det. Sean Suiter just after ending the weeklong lockdown “securing the crime scene” ie media blackout – only to have reporters camera’s booted out again.

2. Suiter’s gun has a serial number. The public has have not been shown if the weapon tested has the same serial number as the Glock service weapon that was assigned to him.

3. The public should be comfortable assuming only that the bullet that killed Suiter likely came from one of the thousands of similar weapons issued by the Baltimore Police department.

4. Suiter may not have ever fired a gun that day. His hand were wiped clean by an overzealous (unidentified) hospital employee, police said. While the report spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the blood on his sleeve, no mention was made of whether gunshot residue (GSR) tests were performed on his shirt or his jacket. Also curious is that BPD originally reported that blood was recovered on his suit jacket and was later changed to his sleeve for no apparent reason once the suicide theory took hold. No explanation is provided for the absence of any photographs on either Suiter’s jacket or his shirt before the IRB became involved a whole year after the shooting.

Unfounded Accusation #2 : Suiter fell on his gun.

Truth: No one has come forward saying they saw Suiter fall or can definitively say where his gun was before he was moved into the patrol car:

At best, the detective with Suiter is an unreliable witness (also a tradition at BPD) and at worse he saw who killed the detective, manipulated the crime scene and/or took part in the cover up. Only photos grabbed from body worn cameras (BWC) of responding officers were provided to the press and there have been no statements attributed to any specific individual saying he or she saw the gun under his body.

It’s not out of the realm of possibility that BPD planted a gun at the scene, removed it and submitted one into evidence and claimed it to be Suiter’s. Ironically, Suiter was scheduled to testify about how multiple Baltimore police officers conspired to hide an illegal fatal car chase by planting evidence that sent two innocent Black men to prison rather than admit they were merely speeding.

NOTE: BPD was reprimanded by the IRB for the contaminated crime scene and “recovery” of a service weapon from the trunk of a patrol car belonging to an unidentified officer at some unspecified time that was logged into evidence as Suiter’s gun.

Baltimore Police’s “Independent Review Board Report. Page 37

In his official interviews, according to the IRB report, homicide detective David Bomenka changed his version of what he saw: included seeing a. Suiter in the act of falling, b. having just collapsed to the ground and c. having had already fallen. But he was was steadfast that he didn’t see a gun in his hand; he only said that he saw gun smoke near Suiter.
Most surprisingly, we don’t know if Bomenka saw or heard Suiter on his departmental radio. There was a transmission of Suiter sounding like he was in distress just as he was shot, according to officials. That would be a question worth knowing the answer to.
When back up officers arrived once Bomenka (or someone) called 911 (the public has not heard the recording either), the photo from the BWC and presented in the IRB report is out of focus and unclear. The peculiar wording indicates the officers “could see” the gun, not that they did see or even that said that they saw the gun. It’s a crucial distinction.

The newspaper of record in March 2018 reported as fact that Suiter’s gun, “freshly fired” was underneath his body when responding officers arrived. It’s important for responsible journalists to distinguish what police said and attribute their claims to the source as opposed to offering up speculation as factual information to a trusting public that journalists have not independently verified or obtained similar statements from multiple sources on the record.

Out of many, the most absurd claim is IRB’s determination that Suiter’s weapon undisputedly fired the fatal shot as it defies logic. First, they tested the blood on the gun BPD found in the patrol car of an unnamed officer who presented it as the same gun that was “freshly fired” that no one saw under his body. Voila, the blood tested on the gun gift wrapped to them matched Suiter’s DNA. Mind you Suiter was transported in a patrol car to the hospital bleeding from a head wound. Whoever removed the gun from the crime scene had ample opportunity to place blood on a service weapon – either a random service weapon or actually the one that belonged to Suiter.

IRB’s suicide theory would have been a more convincing claim had the IRB report included:

the serial numbers of Suiter’s assigned weapon showing they matched the gun tested
the gun tested was the exact same one was recovered at the crime scene (instead of a car trunk), but there are no crime scene photographs of where the gun was found making this impossible
BWC that clearly captured arriving officer’s discovery of the gun under his body as he was rolled over that may or may not be available
crime scene photos of the location of the gun and the bullet that no one thought to take
whether or not Suiter’s DNA was found on the “recovered” bullet
if bullets and casings didn’t just magically disappear from the scene after Suiter died

Confusingly, IRB depicts in a photo the bullet that was not tested for ballistics, have no DNA on them (presumably), and have zero evidentiary value. What should be pictured is Suiter’s firearm circling where the blood splatter was located that actually tested positive for his DNA. Page 42 of IRB report.

Missing from the report is exact amount of blood splatter reportedly on the gun that IRB tested for DNA recovered and tested from the barrel and gun surface. An assessment should be made about whether Suiter’s blood found on the weapon is consistent with someone adding blood to it, or if it is likely that the blood was from a single shot being fired at close range near someone’s head. The IRB made a similar splatter determination with blood photographed on the sleeve, but did not do so with the “smoking gun.”

The problems with a complicit media

So many questions remain unanswered about the investigation, despite the IRB. Last year, a second review of the case by Maryland State Police (MSP) was conducted, but to date no report was released to the public. Unlike the IRB, MSP did not conduct a press conference leaving media outlets to get the finding from Commissioner Michael Harrison. Without any scrutiny from the public, MSP concluded that Suiter shot himself in the head after firing three or more shots into the air before shooting himself.

Neither panel brought in by Baltimore Police department to “investigate” their investigation reported on the lockdown of Harlem Park and BPD certainly didn’t request that either group look into whether it was possible that anyone manipulated the crime scene as part of a wider cover up.

As long as the case remains open, public access to documents remain shielded. Harrison, the fourth commissioner since the shooting, had called the investigation closed after MSP’s findings, only walk it back once the State’s Attorney’s office countered him by calling it an open and pending matter last year as the second anniversary of Suiter’s death approached.

Even with what little is known, it should be at least clear that beyond statements attributed to David Bomenka, nothing reliable has been presented that 1. Suiter was shot with his own service weapon or 2. that his body fell on a smoking gun. Such reporting is far from fact and closer to fable. What is discernable from the reporting is that members of the media were not able to view BWC, did not hear the 911 call for help, have not spoken with any investigators on the record, or even been given witness statements to read.

In advance of the August 2018 IRB report the Baltimore Sun used unnamed and anonymous sources to float out the idea that Suiter shot himself in the head and then fell on his “freshly fired” gun as “new details”.

More from Baltimore Sun’s story by Justin Fenton from March 2018 just before the announcement that an IRB panel would be reviewing the methods BPD used to investigate the homicide.

Residents in the community heard between four and five gunshots according to news reports. Miraculously, after occupying the neighborhood for a week, the crime scene unit was unable to recover a single bullet, although they did retrieve three casings near where he lay dying in the lot. There’s no definitive proof offered that the recovered casings in any way matched Suiter’s weapon, yet the IRB said without hesitancy that they came from his gun, presumably because they were recovered near his body. The leaps in this reasoning might not be judged as too far fetched- had they found the other missing bullets that went into the air but didn’t come down where they could be easily found even after a week of looking for them.

Regrettably, mainstream media in real time shrugged at the occupation of West Baltimore during this entire process, arguably because of the nature of the crime makes them sympathetic to the dangers of law enforcement and more subtlety because the color of the skin of the people complaining about overreach made their claims less newsworthy. Although in November 2019 the ACLU heard the complaints and filed a lawsuit against BPD which did gain media attention.

To any casual observer, the unprecedented 24/7 lockdown of the neighborhood had nothing to do with looking for a shooter, or finding bullets (since they came up empty on both fronts) but served to manipulate the scene and make sure any concocted story would match witness accounts prompting a social media hashtag #FreeWestBaltimore.