If you are a decent person, I suggest you neither eat nor drink while reading the excerpt shown below, because it may cause you to spontaneously hurl anything in your mouth.
From Colin Campbell and Julie Scharper\’s article in the Baltimore Sun:
As the city, state and other groups spend millions of dollars to step up summer outreach to children following Freddie Gray\’s death and April\’s civil unrest, (April) Hopps and hundreds of other volunteers are working with community and faith leaders to create opportunities for them and keep them safe from violence.
The Empowerment Temple is converting a building in Bolton Hill – where Hopps has been volunteering – to a children\’s center named for Gray; it will offer free meals and camps. Volunteers are flocking by the hundreds to Big Brothers Big Sisters, offering to mentor youths in Sandtown-Winchester, where Gray was arrested.
Gray, 25, died a week after sustaining a spinal cord injury while in police custody, leading to protests and then riots that prompted officials to declare a state of emergency, deploy the National Guard and implement a citywide curfew.
Hopps and Gail Evans were among the volunteers who have spent recent days painting bright colors on the walls of the Freddie Gray Children\’s Empowerment Center, in the former Labor Union headquarters building on Eutaw Place.
“Playing outside in Baltimore City is no longer safe,” Evans said. “This is a place to feel safe and to have adult supervision.”
Let\’s get something straight: regardless of what you think about the death of Freddie Gray, he was scum. A drug dealer who, at the age of 25, had already amassed 18 or 19 arrests and spent years in prison.
Who was he selling drugs to? Do you think his “business” was restricted to rich White kids from the suburbs?
And who was he using as lookouts and runners? Do you figure he recruited them from the nearest prep school?
So who do they HONOR by naming a CHILDREN\’S CENTER after?
Freddie Gray, that\’s who.
Incredible. A career criminal who was a scourge of young children, and they\’re naming a children\’s center after him.
Sometimes I throw up my hands in despair, and wonder if there\’s any hope…or if there even should be.
This is one of those times.
