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ELA Lesson Activities

Page 2: Grades PK-1

Page 4: Grades 2 and 3

Page 5: Grades 4-6

Page 6: Grades 7 and 8

Page 8: Grades 9-12

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Lesson for Grade Level: Pre-K – Grade 1 MCCRS Standards: SL.K.1, SL.K.3, SL.K.4, SL.K.5, SL.K.6; SL.1.1, SL.1.2, SL.1.3, SL.1.4, SL.5, SL.6

Theme/Big Question: The focus on anger (or frustration) is important because it is such a common feeling children experience. Often, children are particularly angry because they feel they have no control over what is going on around them, and have little opportunity to express how this makes them feel. If their anger is not channeled in healthy ways, it can lead to problems including fighting, poor grades, destructive friendships, isolation, depression, or volatile “blow-ups.” If you think anger is not happening with your students, you can focus on scared, worried, anxious, etc. The purpose of this session is to validate their feelings of anger and help them identify positive ways to manage and control their anger. Objective: Students will:

1. Discuss the normality of anger amidst the social injustice surrounding Freddie Gray. 2. Think about and share how their community shows their anger. 3. Identify healthy ways to express anger.

Materials: • Graphic organizer (see below) • Markers • A piece of flip chart paper or blackboard and chalk

Books about Anger or Upset Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst Andrew’s Angry Words by Dorothea Lackner The Chocolate Covered Cookie Tantrum by Deborah Blementhal How I Feel Frustrated by Marcia Leonard How I Feel Angry by Marcia Leonard Llama Llama Mad at Mama by Anna Dewdney That Makes Me Mad! by Steven Kroll The Rain Came Down by David Shannon When I’m Angry by Jane Aaron When I’m Feeling Angry by Trace Moroney When I Feel Angry by Cornelia Maude Spelman When Sophie Gets Angry – Really, Really Angry by Molly Garrett Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes. Books about being Scared or Worried Creepy Things are Scaring Me by Jerome and Jarrett Pumphrey How I Feel Scared by Marcia Leonard No Such Thing by Jackie French Koller Sheila Rae, the Brave, by Kevin Henkes Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes When I’m Feeling Scared by Trace Moroney When I Feel Scared by Cornelia Maude Spelman

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Engagement: Say to the class, “Today we’re going to focus on one particular feeling: anger. Feeling angry at a situation or an event in your community is very normal when you’re experiencing some big changes at home that you have little or no control over. However, if we do not acknowledge or recognize the angry feelings, we can end up feeling pretty bad and make some unhealthy decisions.” Using a sheet of flipchart paper, ask the group members to come up with some healthy ways to deal with their feelings of anger. Examples:

• Talk it out with a safe person • Call a friend • Write a letter to the person you are angry with (even if you do not give the letter to the person, it can feel good

to write it) • Try to understand what the other person may be feeling • Take slow and steady breaths while counting to 20 • Journal about it or draw a picture • Ask yourself if this is really worth getting angry about • Walk away from the situation until you cool down • Go outdoors and play for a while

As you prepare to leave, ask everyone, one at a time, to make their angriest face. Compare the differences and similarities between the various facial expressions. (Example: “Almost everyone’s lips were tight, but Daquan was the only one who crossed his arms.”) Something else you can do is make copies of the list of healthy ways to handle anger that the group created during the closing activity, and give each participant a copy to keep or put in a folder. Discussion Questions:

• What have you seen on TV in the last few days that have made you angry? Why? • What could people do when they get angry? • How does it make you feel when you see people starting fires in your neighborhood? • How do you feel when you cannot go to school? • How do you feel when grown-ups are yelling at each other?

Graphic-Organizer/Prewriting: Depending on the grade level, not all questions will be on the graphic organizer. Use your knowledge and understanding of your students to select an appropriate organizer. See below for printable organizers.

Writing: Have students use the graphic organizer as their “writing”. Since students are young it is appropriate for there to be illustrations, invented spellings, and dictated sentences. If students at the upper end of the grade band require more challenging writing activity below is a writing prompt you can give to students. The events of this week have evoked many emotions throughout the city of Baltimore. Identify the emotion or emotions you are feeling. What has caused you to feel this way and how will you deal with these feelings in a positive manner? Additional Links: http://csefel.vanderbilt.edu/modules/2006/feelingchart.pdf http://clevelandschoolsbookfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Lesson-Plan-When-Sophie-Gets-Angry-Really-Really-Angry-Center-Activities.pdf http://kidshealth.org/classroom/prekto2/personal/growing/feelings.pdf http://www.eslkidstuff.com/lesson-plans/pdf/feelings-emotions-lesson-plan.pdf

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Lesson for Grade Level: 2nd and 3rd

MCCRS Standards: RI.2, RI.6, SL.1, SL.2, W.1

Theme/Big Question: What is a protest? The purpose for this activity is to provide a name and historical context to the protests, both violent and non-violent, which have occurred recently. Students are also given an opportunity to write about their understanding of the situation and share their expectations for the outcomes. Background: For this activity, students will examine the concept of a protest and use biographies and narrative nonfiction text from the Baltimore City Public Schools ELA curriculum to support their understanding of the concept. Students will then have an opportunity to record their own accounts and feelings around current events in Baltimore. Engagement:

• Read or refer to texts that are available in 2nd and 3rd grade classroom such as: The Story of Ruby Bridges, MLK and the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, The Bus Ride, Malcolm X: A Fire Burning Brightly, Martin Luther King Jr. (Mara), Cesar Chavez, Cesar Chavez: Protecting Farm Workers, Coretta Scott King, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. (Moore), Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks: First Biographies, Rosa Parks: Civil Rights Pioneer, Time for Kids Biographies

• Help students to define the concept of a protest (include conversation about the desired outcome) and share historical protests through grade level texts

• Discuss the difference between violent and nonviolent protests Discussion Questions:

• How can a protest help a community? Can a protest hurt a community? • What kinds of emotions might protesters feel? How do you know? • What are some examples of outcomes that protesters might want? • What happens if a protest doesn’t work? • What are some things that people protest about? • What do you know about what kept us out of school on Tuesday? • How do these events relate to the concept of a protest? • What feelings do protesters in Baltimore want to share right now? How do you know? • What are your feelings about current events in Baltimore? Why?

Graphic-Organizer/Prewriting: • Create a simple web or mind map with students to recall what they have learned about protests, historical

examples, and even feelings connected to current events in Baltimore Writing:

1) Today we read about ____ (historical protest from one of the texts listed above) and talked about the kinds of protests that are happening in Baltimore right now. Explain the outcomes that you think the protesters in Baltimore want. Do you think that they are going to achieve these outcomes? Why or why not?

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Lesson for Grade Level(s): 4th-6th MCCRS Standards: CCRA. SL.1, CCRA.W.10

Themes/Big Question: Human Rights, Equality- What are human rights and how do people react when they feel as if their rights have been violated? How are communities affected when people feel like their human rights have been violated? Background: This activity can be used to help students process the recent events in Baltimore City as well as other events involving human rights, social injustice, and equality. Engagement: Read a passage from a previous text around human rights or equality (make sure the chosen selection fits the overall theme). Create a web with the words human rights and equality in the middle. Have students quickly write 3 words or short phrases that they think about when hearing these words and connect to these topics (Possible words: justice, peace, protest, race, freedom, opportunity, fair, constitution, violence). Discuss what they know about human rights and equality. Define the terms if needed. Have students create a web with injustice and human rights. Position students in circle or where they can all see each other and pass out one human rights card to each student. Proceed around the room and randomly remove someone’s human rights. Discuss how they feel having their human right taken away and how this would impact their life. Materials: Selection to read aloud from previous module text, human rights cards- http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/documents/EqualRightsRespect/worksheet32-human_rights_cards.pdf Discussion Questions: What do we know about human rights? How did you feel when your human right was taken away from you? How do you feel about the recent events that have taken place here in Baltimore? What human rights do you think people feel have been violated here in Baltimore? Graphic-Organizer/Prewriting: Create a mind map to capture student thinking around human rights and equality (continue to build upon the map as students discuss and share ideas) Possible Writing Prompt: How have the communities in Baltimore been affected as result of people feeling like their human rights have been violated? Teacher Notes:

• Choose the reading selection from previous module text • Prompt students to think about past texts, articles or multi-media they have seen in previous modules. Draw on

student background knowledge of previous curriculum modules. Students in grades 4,5 & 6 have already been exposed to texts such as Teammates (4th), We Are the Ship (5th) and Flesh and Blood so Cheap (6th).

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Grades 7-8 Lesson Seed: Protest Songs as Meaningful Outlet for Social Justice MCCRS Standards: RI 1, 6, 7; W 1; SL 1 Objective: Students will reflect on recent Baltimore events through a variety of activities, culminating in a written argument around the effectiveness of protest songs as an outlet for social justice. The teacher may want to begin by unpacking the term “social justice” either at the beginning of this lesson, or prior to the written product. Word Association and Reflection: • Ask students to brainstorm a list of 5 words that articulate their feelings about the recent events in Baltimore. For

students who need some starter words, consider the following as options: o frustrated, confused, empowered, angry, hopeless, hopeful, enraged, distraught, powerless, powerful,

purposeful, justice. • Ask students to switch their list with a partner. Once the other students have the words, as they to write one

sentence incorporating the words, one sentence for each word. They should write their sentences on index cards or strips of paper.

• We will continue using the words, but will listen to a song first. Audio/Visual Connection: • Play students a clip of a protest song, asking them to pay attention to the emotions that the song evokes. Below are

two examples that are available online. o John Legend and Common – Glory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzbKaDPMoDU o Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come

https://vimeo.com/42382933 • After eliciting feedback from students, play the song again, asking students to listen and write down words that

stand out. • Following the second listening, ask students to discuss the words and emotions with their table mates. Solicit a

larger group discussion. • Inform students that the song they listened to is considered a protest song. This song and others like it are created

in response to situations of social injustice. They express the opinions of the artist in non-violent, expressive ways. Text Connections: • Using the website Newsela, access the article “Protest Songs make a comeback”

o https://newsela.com/articles/protest-songs/id/6400/ *Please note: on the right hand side of the page is a slide bar where teachers can select to

change the Lexile level of the article. Please select a level appropriate for your students. o Students’ purpose for reading is to consider the benefits of protest songs as an outlet.

Students should annotate the text for this purpose. o Students can share annotations with pairs and the class. o The teacher can push students to consider the following questions, or create their own:

What is the purpose of a protest song?

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Do protest songs affect change? How? Why? Are protest songs accessible to all people? How?

Tying Things Together: • In pairs or table groups, students should revisit their words/sentences from earlier in the class. Students can create

their own protest song, using these lines. Students should add and revise these sentences as necessary, creating a product that articulates their feelings in a structured way.

Written Product: • Individually, students should consider their protest song drafts, the article and the audio clip from today’s lesson.

Students are asked to write an argument to support the claim below. They should include clear reasons and relevant evidence from today’s work.

o Protest songs are an effective outlet for social justice.

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Grades 9-12 Lesson Seeds

Standard: RI.9-10.2: Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.

Standard RI.11-12.2: Determine two or more central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to provide a complex analysis; provide an objective summary of the text.

Final Assessment: How do the actions of a few impact the relationships between law enforcement and citizens? Use evidence from the texts and images you will study as well as your own experience to support your position.

1. Choose a word that articulates your feelings about the recent events in Baltimore.

• Frustrated • Confused • Empowered • Angry • Hopeless • Hopeful • Enraged • Distraught • Powerless • Powerful • Purposeful • Justice

2. Explain why you chose this word. In what ways does it describe your emotions or state of mind?

3. Provide students with the opportunity to share with their partner(s) or the class.

4. Have students read the articles below. Use the guiding questions in the graphic organizer below.

Note: Model the process of completing the graphic organizer for the first article. Implement guided practice as necessary.

Article What are the key ideas in this article? What does the author say or suggest about this ideas throughout the article?

Summary:

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Share the following articles with students. The first article focuses on the peaceful protest organized on Saturday April 25th and will provide students with a more profound insight into the events of the past two weeks. The other articles provide additional information and perspectives.

AL JAZEERA, APRIL 25TH 2015 HUMAN RIGHTS Thousands protest over US custody death of Freddie Gray Protest at Baltimore baseball game against death of black man in police custody ends relatively peacefully.

Several thousand protesters converged in the US city of Baltimore on Saturday to protest over the death of 25-year-old black man Freddie Gray while in police custody.

Gray died on Sunday after sustaining multiple injuries which included three fractures in his neck vertebrae, a smashed voicebox and the severing of 80 percent of his spine from his neck.

Gray had been in police custody for a week, having been arrested in a high-crime neighbourhood after he made eye contact with police and fled. After he was caught he was found to be carrying a knife.

Melissa Ealey, Gray's cousin, told Al Jazeera that no crime perpetrated could warrant such abuse.

"There is no reason the police had to conduct themselves in a manner to where … it cost him his life," Ealey said. "I can understand breaking the law is wrong but the way they apprehended him and the things they did were completely against protocol and just inhumane as a whole." 'National epidemic' of violence

Signs in hand, with slogans such as "Jail Killer Police" and "Unite Here," demonstrators from different racial backgrounds flooded two city blocks and marched to city hall, where the crowd overtook a plaza.

March organiser and lawyer Malik Shabazz described violence against blacks by American police officers as "a national epidemic against black men".

Al Jazeera's Shihab Rattansi, reporting from Baltimore, said the marchers had then headed towards Baltimore's Oriole Park Major League Baseball stadium at Camden Yards where Baltimore's Orioles were later set to take on the Boston Red Sox.

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Rattansi said the protest outside the stadium ended relatively peacefully, although a few cars appeared to have been vandalised, as police warned protesters that they would face arrest if they didn't disperse.

"There was not very much in the way of heated scenes, about 20 minutes for the whole day but what we did see today was a few thousand people gather in city hall demanding answers over questions including why he was even arrested in the first place," Rattansi said.

The police had earlier kept a safe distance, as the protesters called for sweeping national policy changes on how cases of police brutality should be dealt with.

Their demands included the establishment of an independent civilian review board in every city to review the cases, immediate suspension without pay for police officers accused of violence and protection for whistleblowers so they could freely speak about police brutality without retaliation.

"Speaker after speaker keep saying here, when a genocide is happening against you, why would you ask the people committing it what is going on," our reporter said.

Stafford Sutton, an activist who attended the march, said changes to federal policies were required to defuse anger after a spate of recent cases of police brutality.

"I've seen a lot of individuals who have been done wrong. A federal mandate needs to be brought down. We have to go through the process, we have to follow it through and go to Washington," Sutton said.

Demonstrators have flooded the streets of Baltimore almost every day since Gray's death, although Saturday's rally was the largest.

Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said roughly 1,200 officers were deployed downtown and across the city to try and keep the peace. At least five police officers were injured and 12 people were arrested. Batts said he believes the "very violent agitators" are not from Baltimore.

Gray's death has been compared to those of other unarmed black men who died at the hands of police in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri, and has intensified a national debate over police treatment of African Americans.

The US Department of Justice is conducting a separate probe into Gray's death. The result of an official police investigation into his fate will also be released on Friday. A wake for Gray is scheduled for Sunday, with his funeral to be held on Monday. Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

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Posted in: NewsPosted: April 28, 2015

Baltimore Riots Interview: Rival Gangs, Bloods & Crips, Unite To Rebuild The Community — Not To Harm Cops

While major networks broadcast the carnage of the Baltimore riots, it hasn’t shown how the community has come

together. Rival gangs, Bloods and Crips, have united to help rebuild Baltimore. Things don’t seem to be exactly how

they’ve been portrayed.

The Baltimore riots have brought out the worst and the best in people. In a twist of events, it’s shown the truth about

“who’s who,” as far as character is concerned. The rioters were far outnumbered by the peaceful protesters. To further

peaceful demonstrations, even the Bloods and the Crips set their rival issues aside to come together. However, this

doesn’t seem to be something that would get mass coverage, given the nature of news networks.

Regardless, as can be seen from the photos, the Baltimore gangs are in truce as they help get the community back

together. It’s similar to what happened during the L.A. riots in the 90s. Many are hopeful that the truce remains.

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Unfortunately, major media slanted the reasoning for the gangs’ truce. As the media pointed out, the two gangs joined

forces to “take out” the Baltimore police. But that was the furthest from the truth. In a private interview, gang members

spoke with local Baltimore news authority, WBAL, to clarify their reasoning for the truce.

“Man, we just want to tell the people of the city of Baltimore that the image they’re trying to portray of the gangs, the

BGF (Black Guerilla Family), the Bloods, the Crips, we did not make that truce to harm cops. We did not come together

against the cops. We’re not about to allow y’all to paint this picture of us. We’ve got soldiers out here. We’re dirty. They

threw bombs at us for trying to stop what’s going on right now. Y’all are not about to do that to us.”

“To stop what’s going on, that’s all we’re trying to do. We just want justice for Freddie Gray. We believe in that. [The

violence and looting] It’s just making us look bad, and it’s backing up what they’re saying about us. They’re saying we’re

animals and we’re acting like savages out here. I don’t agree with what’s going on, but I understand why and why people

are mad. But we’ve got to handle things another way.”

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100 Years: The Riots of 1968

Part of our "100 Years: The Twelve Events That Shaped Baltimore" series

By Michael Yockel - May 2007

The first plate-glass window was smashed around 5:30 p.m. at the Fashion Hat Shop in the 400 block of N. Gay Street.

Half an hour later, roving bands of black teens, itching for more action, looted their first business, Sun Cleaners, at Gay and Monument streets, spiriting away clothes wrapped in plastic bags. At 6:15 p.m., they set their first fire, torching the Ideal Furniture Company in the 700 block of Gay Street.

Alerted to the growing unrest, city cops, on- and off-duty, surged into Baltimore's modest East Side shopping district, setting up headquarters at the nearby Belair Market. While one plainclothes officer characterized the scene as "pretty festive" at 7 p.m., the situation quickly turned malicious, as store after store in the vicinity—groceries, appliance shops, furniture outlets, dry cleaners, five-and-dimes, tailors, taverns, liquor stores, pawn brokers—was broken into and ransacked.

At 8:45 p.m., the evening's first serious blaze (four alarms) consumed an A&P supermarket and three adjacent shops in the 1400 block of N. Milton Street, and, within the next hour, the disturbances spread to the commercial strips along North and Greenmount avenues. Around the same time, a suspected looter was shot and killed in a bar at Harford Road and Lafayette Avenue, while throughout the area, truculent young men pelted policemen and firemen with bottles and stones.

At 10 p.m., city police admitted their inability to contain the chaos, and Governor Spiro Agnew, at the request of Baltimore Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro III, called in the National Guard, simultaneously issuing an 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew for the city.

By late evening on Saturday, April 6, 1968, the Baltimore riots were in full swing. When the sun rose the next day, 5,500 National Guardsmen, 400 state troopers, and 1,200 city cops occupied Baltimore. Three people were dead; 70 injured; more than 100 arrested; and 250 fire alarms had been reported. On the East Side, still-smoldering buildings lined streets and sidewalks that were flecked with shards of broken glass.

Sparked by the April 4 assassination of civil-rights patriarch Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, and fueled by decades of repressed anger and resentment over perceived political, social, and economic injustices, African-American communities erupted in violence in Baltimore and many other U.S. cities—New York, Boston, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Tallahassee—with Chicago and Washington, D.C., suffering the most extensive damage.

When similar rioting also engulfed Baltimore's West Side on Sunday, April 7, it was Agnew's turn to ask for help; he turned to the White House for assistance. President Lyndon Johnson sent in nearly 3,000 U.S. Army soldiers, a force that ultimately would swell to approximately 5,000 troops. Despite the reinstitution of a curfew on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, the looting contagion continued to spread, striking businesses along York Road, Harford Road, and Edmondson Avenue. Worse, throughout the city, snipers fired on beleaguered police, firemen, soldiers, and National Guardsmen, while taunting groups of blacks and whites squared off on street corners.

Finally, on Tuesday night, the fever broke, and calm began to return. Devastation unlike anything seen since the Great Fire of 1904 stretched from Patterson Park Avenue to the east, W. Belvedere Avenue and 33rd Street to the north, Hilton Street and Hilton Road to the west, and Pratt Street and Washington Boulevard to the south.

Over four nights and three days, Baltimore experienced its greatest unnatural disaster of the second half of the 20th century—looting and arson on a massive, unprecedented scale. The grim toll: six dead; more than 700 people injured; 5,500 arrested; 1,050 businesses looted, vandalized, or obliterated by fire; and an estimated $13.5 million in property damages (which equates to nearly $79 million in today's dollars).

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"The riots," as everyone called them, remain a watershed event, indelibly imprinted in the memories of those who witnessed the turmoil. Jazz singer Ruby Glover, who, in addition to her nightclub gigging back then, also worked as an administrator in the emergency room at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was out with friends and several co-workers "having a wonderful time" at a Pennsylvania Avenue club early on the evening of April 7. Unaware of the curfew, Glover was on stage performing when "the door burst open and there were all these soldiers with their sergeant, and he said, 'Outside, all hell has broken loose.'"

As the troops hustled everyone out of the club, Glover was thrust into a raging melee. "It looked like everything was on fire," she recalls. "It appeared that everything that we loved and adored and enjoyed was just being destroyed. It was just hideous."

On the night the riots began, James Bready, then an editorial writer for The Evening Sun, piled into a car with two newspaper colleagues in order to survey the escalating situation: "We drove along North Avenue, and I remember seeing kids running along from store to store with lighted torches to touch them off. But nobody ever tried to stop the car or interfere with us."

In the months following the riots, various reports analyzed the disturbances, in part examining the underlying societal forces that catalyzed the unrest. In June, the suitably staid Maryland Crime Investigating Commission Report of the Baltimore Civil Disturbance of April 6 to April 11, 1968 explained that "social and economic conditions in the looted areas constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites . . . Our investigation arrives at the clear conclusion that the riot in Baltimore must be attributed to two elements—'white racism' and economic oppression of the Negro. It is impossible to give specific weights to each, but together they gave clear cause for many of the ghetto residents to riot."

That September, the Middle Atlantic Region American Friends Service Committee's left-leaning "Report on Baltimore Civil Disorders, April 1968" declared that "different people were acting various roles in the disorders. Some were simply stealing desired goods. Some were seeking revenge upon storekeepers who, they felt, had exploited them and other black people. Some were consciously demonstrating the power of black people. But regardless of their roles, people knew that this was a shared experience and a shared act of black people, a shared expression of rage, grief, and frustration in the face of white dominance and obtuseness."

Tommy D'Alesandro, mayor for a mere 75 days when the riots exploded, sensed those same conditions. "There was a hurt within the black community that they were not getting their fair share," D'Alesandro notes now. "We were coming from a very segregated city during the 30's, 40's, and 50's—and it was still a segregated atmosphere."

Reflecting on the civil unrest, Bready suspects that "black people felt release after generations of 'You mustn't do this, you mustn't go there, you can't say that or think that.' Suddenly, the lid was off."

According to both the Crime Investigation Commission and the Friends Service Committee reports, the riots consciously sought to tilt the city's entrenched black/white economic imbalance. "Black militants weren't trying to start a race riot but trying to establish the machinery whereby Negroes were to run their own neighborhood stores," the former theorized. "The first phase of the plan was to burn out the white merchants." The latter study agreed that "almost all of the property damaged was owned by whites, not blacks," while positing that "this selectivity in the choice of targets seems to demonstrate that a prime motive was to get back at merchants known to have humiliated or exploited black people."

Post-riots, some merchants took their insurance money and rebuilt their businesses; others simply boarded up their establishments. Simultaneously, the housing market dove south. "What little confidence there had been among investors that they could ride out the weak market before the riots waned away as the scale of vandalism after the riots increased," contended Michael Stegman in his 1972 book Housing Investment in the Inner City: The Dynamics of Decline (A Study of Baltimore, Maryland, 1968-1970). "The seeming inability of city authorities to control it in any way became evident, and the polarization of landlord and tenant intensified. Values, which had been moving downward before, seemed to plummet sharply."

So did the city's population. People poured out of Baltimore, especially whites. The incipient urban depopulation that occurred between 1950 and 1960—from 950,000 to 939,000 residents, the city's first decrease since 1800—snowballed

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after the riots. From 1970 to 1980, Baltimore's population declined from 906,000 to 787,000. Left behind in the whirlwind of "white flight" to the suburbs, the percentage of black residents increased substantially. Pegged at only 24 percent in 1950, the city's "non-white" population steadily increased, registering at 65 percent by 2000, among 651,000 total residents.

Not surprisingly, this exodus dramatically affected commerce, particularly along the city's traditional Howard and Lexington streets shopping nexus, where a quartet of department stores—Stewart's, Hecht Co., Hutzler's, and Hochschild-Kohn—had thrived for decades, catering primarily to white ladies in white gloves.

Slowly, these behemoths withered and expired, their customer base severely undermined by a tsunami of suburban malls that opened in the 1970's and 1980's: Columbia, Golden Ring, White Marsh, Security Square, Hunt Valley, Owings Mills, among others.

Ultimately, perhaps the riots' most significant impact lies in something intangible: the way they forced Baltimoreans, both black and white, to reassess the city's prevailing racial dynamic.

"In some instances, the riots brought the races closer together; in some instances, they scared whites," says Dr. Charles Simmons, founder and president of Sojourner-Douglass College. Active in 1968 in the city's civil-rights movement in association with his job as a field representative for the Teamsters Union—while also attending Morgan State—Simmons emphasizes that "the riots really weren't personal: They were against the system, not individual white people. There was only property loss."

Pondering the turmoil now, D'Alesandro considers it "an awakening, a recognition that some in our society were being shortchanged, and they had to be brought in through the legitimate channels of government and commerce and education and jobs and housing.

"A lot of people thought the riots knocked us out. But we redoubled our efforts, and we accelerated the change that was needed, a change in people's attitudes—to give an acknowledgement throughout the community that all people are welcome."

And yet, nearly 40 years after the riots, Ruby Glover still laments that "so much in the city today almost brings back those memories—with the gangs, and the way that police have to work on streets where I grew up, where I laughed and entertained. There's still great fear, but it's coming not just from whites to blacks—now it's blacks to blacks."

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The Washington Post Morning Mix

Baltimore riots evoke memories of aftermath of MLK’s assassination By Nick Kirkpatrick April 28 at 5:53 AM

Fires and riots in Baltimore on Monday reminded some of the another major civil disturbance the city once faced.

“We cannot let this be a repeat of 1968,” Brandon Scott, Baltimore City councilman in the third district, said on

Monday. “The neighborhood they’re in right now is still burned down from 1968.”

Scott was not alone. Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young also said that Monday’s events reminded him of the two

weeks that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when Baltimore and cities across the country burned.

“Many of the areas where we’re seeing disturbances today actually never recovered from the 1968 riots,” Lawrence

Brown, an assistant professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore who studies housing, told the Los Angeles Times.

Baltimore was hit hard in 1968: Six killed, 700 injured, 1,000 small businesses looted or burned and 5,800 people

arrested. Here’s a look back:

A young boy ran from a Baltimore grocery store with a box of candy. (AP)

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A fire on Gay Street amid looting. (AP)

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Baltimore police pinned down a curfew breaker on April 9, 1968. (AP)

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A Baltimore policeman stops an African American after a breaking-and-entering at a grocery store on April 8, 1968. (AP)

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A looted Baltimore liquor store on Pennsylvania Avenue. (AP)

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A National Guardsman with three men suspected of looting a Baltimore business. (AP)