Baltimore, like most of America’s large cities, fell to pieces in the late 1960s. Crime and disorder skyrocketed, forcing businesses and middle-class residents to flee to the suburbs. Anyone who stayed, either by choice or by necessity, learned to live under a cloud of menace.
For decades the intellectual class has made a habit of excusing urban violence, explaining that crime is an entirely rational response to the social forces at work in the inner city. Systemic poverty and the chronic underfunding of schools, it is said, have created an underclass for whom selling illegal drugs is an economic necessity and street violence a form of revolutionary expression. By such lights, urban crime is a protest against what Mark Bowden calls “a time-honored American project, Keeping the Black Man Down.”
