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Anger, joy mix at Baltimore rally

Charges against 6 officers soften mood at planned protest

A rally Saturday at Baltimore’s City Hall focused on the prosecution of police officers charged in Freddie Gray’s death. Andrew Burton/Getty Images

BALTIMORE — Voicing anger over police violence and jubilation over the decision a day earlier to charge six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, thousands of people gathered Saturday at a rally in front of City Hall and in a smaller march through the streets of Baltimore in the aftermath of Gray’s death after he was arrested April 12.

The peaceful beginning of the march and the rally offered a stark contrast to the aftermath of a march a week earlier that started off orderly but ended with a spasm of violence that prompted the governor to call in the National Guard and to impose a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew.

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Even with Guard troops and armored vehicles still stationed just outside the neighborhood where Gray, 25, was arrested, there were signs Saturday that the community was returning to some sense of normalcy.

As demonstrators gathered for the start of the march, children played with a toy car on a stoop; church members emerged from the funeral of their bus driver.

“It’s going to be peaceful — yes, it is,” said Delphie Horne, 86, emerging from Mount Pisgah Christian Methodist Episcopal Church at North Fulton and Riggs avenues. She and her granddaughter Michelle Lennon, 12, had just attended the funeral; Michelle shook her head shyly when asked if she expected to attend Saturday’s protests.

Across the street, the Guard troops stood ready. Another church member, Sharon Ann Hargrove, 62, who works as a tax preparer here, stopped to thank them. “I know y’all give up your life every day for us,” she told them. Turning to a reporter, she added, “They’re not our enemies.”

But on the minds and lips of many was the announcement Friday by the state’s attorney for Baltimore City, Marilyn J. Mosby, that she would file criminal charges against the six officers, and their subsequent arrest.

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“I think they charged the officers just to calm the city down,” said Tajhi Cooper, 22, a lifelong resident of the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. “But I don’t think they’re going to get convicted.”

The protest, he said, “was showing that we want change, that we want something different.”

Many people came with a sense that they were watching history unfold, with origins in the civil rights era but an ultimate path still unknown.

Rashaan Brave, a division chief in the Baltimore Parks and Recreation Department; Rashad Vance, who teaches at a middle school and Morgan State University; and Travis Vance, a civil engineer, all of whom live in Baltimore, made their way on bicycles to City Hall. Each was trying to understand the aftermath of Gray’s death, the anger of young people, and ways to help them.

“This is history. I just wanted to be involved,” said Rashad Vance, 32. “I’ve been telling my students, ‘Protest, but nonviolently.’” He said he could not agree with the looting and destruction that had ravaged parts of the city.

Travis Vance, 28, his brother, said the reaction was natural and valid. “The youths are tired, restless,” he said, adding that older people keep stressing the nonviolent approaches of the civil rights movement, but young people are far removed from that period by time and attitude.

“We hear about the civil rights movement,” Travis Vance said. “We read it in history books.”

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But in Baltimore, he said, there is almost a desensitization to violence since many young people see it daily in their communities. Violence has become an answer, right or wrong, he said.

Saturday’s march, like the one a week ago that drew thousands, was organized by Malik Shabazz, president of the Washington-based group Black Lawyers for Justice and a former chairman of the New Black Panther Party. For nearly two weeks, since Gray died, city leaders have been warning against “outside agitators,” an oblique reference to Shabazz, who is clearly making them nervous.

“They should be nervous,” Shabazz said in an interview Friday night. “The youth went off and had a rebellion because the established leadership has not represented them well.”

Shabazz, 46, who has led similar protests in cities like Ferguson, Mo., and Charleston, S.C., after police killings of black men, has been labeled an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which calls him a “racist black nationalist” who is “particularly skilled at orchestrating provocative protests.”

The march he led here April 25 turned briefly violent after he urged protesters at a City Hall rally to “shut it down!” Shabazz said afterward that he was calling only for civil disobedience, not violence, but added that he was not surprised by the riots that tore through Baltimore early last week.

“The rebellion was brewing before I got here, and the rebellion was going to happen whether I got here or not,” he said.

Community activists and black religious leaders, including the Rev. Jamal Bryant, pastor of the Empowerment Temple, said they would stay away from Saturday’s march; Bryant was planning his own rally at City Hall on Sunday.

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