President Obama’s Urban Agenda: Useful Models from Baltimore

Published July 15, 2009 at 6:48 p.m.

Few of the cities that are being overwhelmed by these social ills, Camden and Newark, New Jersey; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Durham, North Carolina; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Houston, Texas; and Washington, D.C, have launched initiatives to effectively confront these challenges as I have discovered in Baltimore, Maryland.  

In Baltimore, a diverse group of residents have taken the initiative to address these urgent issues.  Although these programs were developed independently, they have an unusual synergy in that each supports the work of the other.  

Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, President of the University of Maryland at Baltimore County and philanthropists, Robert and Jane (now deceased) Meyerhoff, co-founded the Meyerhoff Scholars Program in 1988 to recruit, mentor, and advance African American male students into engineering, science, and related fields at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels (later expanded to include other minorities and females).  The participants have come from a cross-section of socioeconomic backgrounds, and the Meyerhoff Scholars initiative has become a national model.

A parallel program developed by Dr. Ben Carson, Professor and Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is the Carson Scholars.  It identifies and encourages gifted and talented public school students of color who are often overlooked and/or ostracized in public school settings.  This program also has a companion Reading Project which has established reading rooms in public schools for students and parents.  It is now operating in an additional 25 states.

Dr. Andres’ Alonzo, Chief Executive Officer of the Baltimore City Schools, has taken an aggressive approach in reshaping Baltimore’s public schools in an effort “to make them work for, not against the children.”  By personally responding to the concerns of both students and parents, he has begun to create a culture of high achievement in a system where “historically only about half of the students have graduated.” 

One of his major accomplishments is the placement of an alternative school for “at risk” students in the school district’s central office; this has never been done in an urban or suburban school system.  It sends a message to these youth, and the community at large, that all students are valued and that the Baltimore Public Schools are committed to the principle that all kids “can be taught.”

In that regard, the Turning the Corner After-School Program, developed and personally funded with more than $6 million by Eddie C. Brown, CEO of Brown Capital Management, with his wife, C. Sylvia Brown, through their Brown Family Foundation, is one of a number of educational initiatives they have funded to support students in the Baltimore City Schools. Located in the most challenging area of inner city Baltimore, it is targeted at middle school students from environments with significant levels of violence, unemployment, concentrated poverty (where more than 40 percent of all resident live below the poverty level), a disproportionate number of poor, single-parent households lacking traditional parenting skills, and large numbers of ex-offenders returning from prison with limited educational skills.  Turning the Corner provides students with the values and academic support that helps them to resist the negative pull of the streets.

The Browns also fund the Brown Community Health Scholars at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health to support doctoral students who are researching strategies to reduce health disparities in urban communities - which disproportionately impact minorities.

Another program that is critical to the success of the preceding ones is the Violence Intervention Program (VIP) established by Dr. Carnel Cooper, a trauma surgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center.  Nearly all of the victims are African American and Hispanic males from the most poverty-ridden neighborhoods of Baltimore’s inner city.  In an effort to reduce the number of repeat patients from intentional injuries (gunshots, beatings, and stabbings), the VIP addresses the social issues facing the patients in their community environments in order to break the cycle of violence.  It also focuses on those inner city youth and adults who have already been victimized by violence and seeks to rescue them from the criminal justice system as early as possible.

In addition, Dan Rodricks, a columnist with the Baltimore Sun, has developed a program for ex-offenders to facilitate their successful re-integration into mainstream society.  By being connected to substance abuse services, employment assistance, personal counseling, and social support, ex-offenders have a higher probability of remaining free of re-incarceration, while simultaneously reducing criminal activity in Baltimore’s inner city.  Currently, the recidivism rate for all of Baltimore’s ex-offenders is more than fifty percent within three years.  Without intervention, these returning residents are at substantial risk of going back to prison, and are more likely to model negative behaviors that encourage low-income youth to pursue a life of crime.

Finally, Raymond Haysbert, retired CEO of Park Sausage Co., has convened a citywide meeting of Black men to organize a mentoring program for Baltimore’s at-risk African American male youth.  Recognizing the social, educational, and fatherlessness crisis they are facing, Haysbert and others have taken a stand to save this generation.  Such an effort is urgently necessary if Baltimore’s poor communities are to be revitalized.

Collectively, these initiatives demonstrate the willingness of a committed group of Baltimore leaders to contribute personal and financial resources to positively develop human capital in the inner city.  They are examples of what needs to be done in our decaying urban centers if communities of color, and our nation, are to survive and prosper.

These individuals recognize, as do the noted comedian and educator, Bill Cosby, and Harvard professor, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, that despite the remaining structural and racial inequalities in American society, African Americans and other citizens have to provide the leadership necessary to empower their communities to compete and succeed in the 21^st century.

President Obama has stepped up to address major issues impacting the African American and other minority communities on a national level by providing increased funding for public education, directing Attorney General Eric Holder to pursue policy and legislation to reduce the sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine (which has resulted in the long-term imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of African American and Hispanic males and females), passing legislation to provide health coverage for low-income children, and proposing a national health policy to cover the uninsured.

Government alone, even the massive federal stimulus package can not solve the aforementioned urban problems, but President Obama is doing his part to address them.  Black leaders, organizations, and members of the general population must now step up locally, and with non-governmental initiatives, to support President Obama’s national efforts.  Baltimore is showing the way.

Walter C. Farrell Jr. is Professor of Management and Community Practice in the School of Social Work and a Fellow in the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He is also a Fellow in the Education in the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Fellow in the Educational Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University in Tempe.