Former Baltimore City mayor Kurt Schmoke doesn’t care to dwell on his past in politics.
The city’s first elected Black mayor didn’t hang on to the framed map marking the locations of completed projects that colleagues presented him on his last day in office. And when Schmoke thinks of the moments in his life that he would handle differently, it’s the tie games and losses from his notable athletics career that come to mind.
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Still, Schmoke, once a student of history himself and now president of the University of Baltimore, understands the value of mining the past for wisdom and lessons. So for the past several months on Tuesday afternoons, the former mayor has offered himself up to students enrolled in a university course on Baltimore City’s complicated history.
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The course, led by professor Joshua Davis, takes students through several hundred years of the region’s political and cultural past.
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As co-teacher this term, Schmoke brought in such guest speakers as former mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young and former drug kingpin Maurice “Peanut” King. Other weeks, he sat quietly in the back row, a first-person source just waiting for students to pull him off the shelf and crack him open.
Leaving politics behind
With more than 15 years of experience in public office, Schmoke has learned some things about the city once described as having “rot beneath the glitter.”
The former mayor believes in the transformative power of education and wants his students to think critically about the decisions that built Baltimore, including his own.
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Schmoke isn’t a stranger to teaching at the college level, but this University of Baltimore class marked the first time his course material included chapters out of his own life. It comes at a time when lawmakers and public figures nationwide are facing criticism or celebration for past actions that resurface in the public’s awareness online.
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Just as doctors ask for a patient’s medical history, so too must Baltimoreans consider their past as they search for solutions to the city’s most persistent problems, Schmoke said.
“I wasn’t looking at this as an opportunity for my personal reflection,” he said. “It was helpful to the students who were using this class to think about how they can address problems facing Baltimore in the future by knowing about the problems the city has faced.”
Footprints of past policies
More than a dozen students gathered in the heart of Fells Point one sunny September Tuesday and studied their surroundings to the sounds of Davis’s lecture and pedestrian chatter.
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The neighborhood, known for its bustling nightlife even at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, was also a bastion of resistance to the federal ban on alcohol a century prior.
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Davis asked students to lift their gaze from street level to spot a fading “Vote Against Prohibition” mural painted decades ago on the side of a building that now houses the late-night bakery chain Insomnia Cookies.
“They’re called ghost signs,” the professor told the class.
The hand-painted advertisements appearing on old buildings are often preserved for nostalgic or historic purposes, still visible to those who know where to look.
More invisible signs of Baltimore’s past are preserved in the memories of the people who were there. As a child growing up in segregated Baltimore, Schmoke never felt comfortable in Fells Point, he told the group.
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The Baltimore native came of age during the city’s civil rights era, graduating from Baltimore City College and moving on to earn a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University in 1971. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar and later earned his law degree from Harvard Law School.
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After completing his studies, Schmoke returned to Maryland to practice law and eventually was elected Baltimore state’s attorney, followed by mayor three times beginning in 1987.
The University of Baltimore course, which ended last month, focused on the city’s past as a mechanism for understanding its present.
The impact of decisions can ripple across generations.
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“Our city has major challenges, including racial and economic inequality, crime and unequal benefits of development, and the population loss and unequal ways in which working-class neighborhoods don’t get a piece of the pie,” Davis said.
Not far from Fells Point, several of Schmoke’s redevelopment initiatives endure — the Power Plant building in the Inner Harbor, the Pleasant View Gardens public housing complex just north of the Jonestown neighborhood and the Port Discovery Children’s Museum flanking President Street.
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As Schmoke was leaving office in 1999 after deciding not to seek a fourth term, a poll found that a majority of voters still largely admired the longtime mayor.
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However, critics called him ineffective and pointed to the city’s lasting problems with crime, poor schools and high taxes despite being given 12 years in charge.
As the class wandered through Fells Point, Davis asked the students to study their surroundings and shout out some of the other footprints of past policies: industrial buildings converted into apartment complexes, water-based trade and transportation, a military presence.
“Tourists,” Schmoke called out.
'Former mayors ought to be seen but not heard'
Schmoke doesn’t care to criticize sitting mayors for their decisions. It’s already a tough job.
“Former mayors ought to be seen but not heard,” he joked.
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The question he gets asked most often concerns one of his biggest controversies as mayor. In 1988, the former prosecutor famously shocked some voters and nabbed national headlines for declaring criminal justice policies associated with the “War on Drugs” a failure.
Decriminalization in favor of stronger public health strategies was an unpopular position at the time, and Schmoke said he “paid the price” for it. The fallout from that stance was later memorialized on the HBO drama “The Wire,” in which Schmoke has a cameo as a health commissioner who cautions a fictional Black mayor that he will be known as “the most dangerous man in America” for endorsing an effort to legalize drugs.
If Schmoke could do it all again, he’d stand by his statements but would identify specific public policies that could have been deployed as an alternative to the tough-on-crime strategies of the last century.
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Still, Schmoke was elected two more times in Baltimore.
“It was as though [voters] said, ‘Look, we disagree with you, but we are proud of the fact that you haven’t just changed your position by putting your finger to the wind,’ ” Schmoke said.
Years later, the nation continues to grapple with enormous incarceration rates that disproportionately impact people of color. And Baltimore, too, continues to grapple with reckonings on racism, criminal justice and poverty since Freddie Gray’s 2015 death from injuries suffered in police custody. The Department of Justice found the following year that Baltimore police routinely violated the constitutional rights of residents, particularly those who are Black or living in low-income neighborhoods.
Baltimore’s current state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, cited Schmoke’s 1988 comments when she too condemned the war on drugs and announced that she would no longer prosecute low-level offenses, including drug possession.
'Politics change'
By contrast, some of Schmoke’s other decisions as mayor have aged poorly in the public arena. Early in the semester, student Yousef Miller, a philosophy major from Pasadena, asked Schmoke why he decided to commemorate the city’s Confederate statues during his time as mayor.
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In 1997, the city was celebrating its bicentennial and, as part of the festivities, Schmoke rededicated the city’s monuments, including those that celebrated people who fought a war to maintain slavery.
“Politics change, obviously,” Schmoke said.
The attitude at the time was that rededication of monuments would be a unifying event marking Baltimore’s varied history, Schmoke said. These days, he probably would have favored adding new plaques to the monuments that expand on context and how they came to be erected. He did not criticize then-mayor Catherine Pugh’s decision in 2017 to remove the statues in the dead of night to avoid clashes like the one days earlier in Charlottesville.
Miller, who is also Black, said he respected a politician who stands by their decisions. The 23-year-old wants to pursue politics himself one day and was thrilled with the opportunity to learn from Schmoke.
“I told like 10 people I’m getting taught by the mayor,” Miller said. “To get to be mentored by him, it’s so cool.”
Inside the University of Baltimore classroom, about eight students sat in neat rows at long tables in front of a projector screen.
Schmoke’s seat in the back gave him a view of Baltimore Penn Station and the developing neighborhood around the university’s campus.
Students in the class were curious about the changing neighborhoods and gentrification, somewhat to Schmoke’s surprise.
He expected students to inquire about the history of the neighborhood rather than contemporary problems.
During a discussion of Bolton Hill, the group lobbed questions about the prices of homes and who had lived in them historically, Schmoke said. They discussed policies that could have helped or hurt the neighborhood.
Schmoke didn’t tell them about the time early in his career when he and his wife experienced racism in Bolton Hill. A White landlady offered to show the couple an apartment for rent but told them the flat was no longer available when they arrived minutes later for a walk-through.
These days, Schmoke has been thinking a lot about change — and how to take charge of it. How can an institution or a city become proactive about change instead of being bowled over by it?
'The City That Reads'
During one class period in November, Schmoke sat at the front of the room with Young, the former mayor, for a question-and-answer discussion. Student Bedell Terry raised his hand and asked: What will your legacy be? Schmoke spent his own first day as Baltimore mayor considering this question.
News outlets at the time noted that he spent the day not at City Hall, but at home working on his inaugural speech. He wanted to find a way to sum up his main goal in office.
“Of all the things I might be able to accomplish as mayor of our city,” Schmoke said in his speech, “it would make me the proudest if one day it could simply be said that this is a city that reads, that this is a city that waged war on illiteracy.”
When Schmoke launched “The City That Reads” slogan two years later, jobs in the city required more education than positions that were available in the 1950s and ’60s, he said. Schmoke saw education as a path to economic growth and stability for the city, and drafted the snappy shorthand “city that reads” for promoting education in hopes people would remember it.
The city schools were in disarray at the time and Schmoke played an active role in overhauling the system’s funding and governance in the late 1990s.
Still, the slogan soon became a bedrock for a variety of tongue-in-cheek criticisms.
High homicide rates led to the “city that bleeds” and high teen pregnancy rates begot the “city that breeds.”
Schmoke stands by the mission outlined in his original speech. If he could be remembered for one thing, it would be using education as a vehicle for positive, proactive change.
For their final papers, students were asked in part to define and explain what they considered the top problems facing Baltimore.
Schmoke’s answers are “crime and grime,” the same as they were when he first ran for mayor more than 30 years ago. And he believes the city has never truly reconciled its racial division.
The former mayor can teach students what he’s learned about the city’s problems, but it likely will fall to them to fix it.
Schmoke refers to himself as a “recovering politician.”
Maybe, the history course will give them the critical thinking tools to do so.
If you ask Schmoke what his legacy might be in Baltimore, he answers quickly.
“Hopefully,” he said, “it hasn’t been written yet.”
— Baltimore Sun
Baltimore Sun librarian Paul McCardell contributed to this report.