Category: Baltimore Community

By Stephen Janis, Special to the AFRO Any expectations a state panel convened in Annapolis to investigate the disgraced Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) unit would deliver dramatic moments or new revelations about corruption in the Baltimore Police Department(BPD) were quickly dashed Nov 13. Instead of probing questions and demands for transparency, the newly constituted body […]

By J. K. Schmid, Baltimore AFRO Staff It’s a dark and lonely approach to Linden Park Apartments in the Bolton Hill community of West Baltimore. The street lights lining McMechen Street are out, and the parking lot is only briefly lit by a solitary strobe. “Where are the police?” Leo W. Burroughs, Jr. asked in […]

By J. K. Schmid, AFRO Staff Writer “Do not pick up anything on the street,” Isadore Hampton tells her great nephew. Hampton is worried about needles and other dangerous waste littering the sidewalks of Baltimore’s blighted communities. The longer properties remain abandoned, the more likely they’ll draw squatters or turn into shooting galleries, she says. The […]

By E.R. Shipp, Special to the AFRO As Henry A. Welcome watched a gaggle of officials symbolically tear down a corner of a strip of pitiful storefronts near his home, he could not help remembering his introduction to the once-vibrant Northwood Shopping Center 55 years ago. The Honduran native had come to Baltimore in February 1963 […]

By Deborah Bailey, Special to the AFRO Signs of new life are stirring at Havenwood Road in Northeast Baltimore week. Developers for  Northwood Commons, Morgan State University, and the local community celebrated the groundbreaking, Nov. 1, for the long-awaited Northwood Commons Project, in a high energy, white-tent ceremony at the shopping center this week. “This morning […]

By DAVID McFADDEN, Associated Press BALTIMORE (AP) — Young “squeegee kids” who wash car windshields while darting in and out of Baltimore traffic could eventually go from street hustling to conventional employment under a privately-funded program pitched by the city’s mayor. Aiming to solve the decades-old issue, rekindled amid more motorist complaints, Mayor Catherine Pugh forecasts […]

By Sean Yoes, Baltimore AFRO Editor, syoes@afro.com The age of Trump has ushered in a wave of vitriol in the American political discourse, perhaps unprecedented in the country’s history. And accompanying the nation’s increasingly poisonous political air is a burgeoning wave of intolerance and a rise in hate crimes. A new report published by the Baltimore Sun […]

By AFRO Staff The last recorded lynching in the state of Maryland occurred Oct. 18, 1933, when George Armwood, a 23-year-old laborer was murdered in Princess Anne on the state’s Eastern Shore. The heinous details of Armwood’s murder horrified the state’s Black community and galvanized the burgeoning civil rights community. Armwood was just one of […]