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francis scott key bridge
Baltimore Drive-By: The Bridge, the City, and Infrastructural Racism
As we remember those who lost their lives in the bridge disaster, let's not forget the people who are killed by structural violence every day in Baltimore.
Mar 31, 2024
Baltimore's mayor was the target of racist social media attacks after he spoke to reporters about the collapse of the Key Bridge. That's disgusting, but it's hardly surprising. Racism is carved into the city's very infrastructure. It has reshaped its neighborhoods, highways, and mass transit.
The destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge was tragic. But the bridge's primary purpose wasn't to serve Baltimore; it was to get around it. It certainly wasn't built for Baltimore's low-income residents, many of whom don't even have cars. What good is a bridge to people who don't own an automobile?
The numbers are startling on that score. Nationally, only 8.3 percent of American households don't have a car. But in Baltimore's Sandtown neighborhood, that figure is 58.4 percent. It's 48.9 percent in Southwest Baltimore and 47.9 percent in Upton/Druid Heights.
These neighborhoods are under siege. In Upton/Druid Heights, for example, 58 percent of children live in poverty. That's nearly six times higher than the overall state of Maryland.
People are dying in Baltimore — not from the drive-by shootings you see in the news from time to time, which have a relatively low body count. The large-scale dying comes from the city's structural drive-by, reflected in the bridges, tunnels, and highways that let interstate travelers bypass Baltimore as if it wasn't even there.
That's not to say infrastructure isn't a good investment. The structural drive-by is seen in the investments that don't happen.
Although the Key Bridge carried local traffic, its essential function was to move passengers and cargo along the interstate highway system. But another infrastructure project, which never got the green light, would have helped Baltimore's lower-income neighborhoods more.
The Red Line, a proposed addition to the city's rail system, would have linked lower-income, majority Black neighborhoods to jobs in other parts of the city –– in Camden Yards, the Inner Harbor, and the universities, medical centers, and corporations on the east side of town. But the Red Line was never built. After a string of delays, Republican Governor Larry Hogan — now, puzzlingly, the leading candidate for senator in this predominantly Democratic state — killed the project for good.
Journalist Alon Levy put it succinctly in his article on the decision, headlined "How You Can Tell Larry Hogan's Decision to Kill the Red Line Was Racially Discriminatory." Here's how: Hogan killed Baltimore's Red Line but promoted the Purple Line in richer, whiter Montgomery County. That led to a Title VI civil rights lawsuit and a federal investigation at the close of the Obama administration. But the investigation was killed after Trump took office, and the lawsuit lost momentum.
Transportation infrastructure has a long segregationist history, in Baltimore and across the country. The mid-twentieth century highway construction boom fueled white flight from urban centers. But white flight began even earlier in Baltimore, as journalist Alec MacGillis explains, with the construction of a pioneering streetcar system in the early twentieth century. That gave rise to white "streetcar suburbs" like Catonsville and Oakenshawe.
White flight made it easier to systematically neglect a city's remaining, Black neighborhoods. So did the real-estate practice of "blockbusting," which lowered the value of working-class white homes by preying on racist fears over integration. As University of Maryland Prof. W. Edward Orser documents, "blockbusting" in Baltimore allowed real estate companies to buy White homes at a loss and then sell them to Black families at inflated prices. Working-class Whites were robbed of an asset, Black families were robbed through overcharging, and segregation got worse.
Not that housing discrimination was anything new in Baltimore. It pioneered residential segregation in 1910, when the City Council passed a law designating city blocks as White or Black. (It was later struck down by the Supreme Court.)
People forget that Maryland is below the Mason-Dixon line and slavery was legal there until 1864. Advertisements for the "sale" of enslaved people were once common in the Baltimore Sun.
Today, as in the past, structural violence kills. Life expectancy in Upton/Druid Heights is 62.9 years, but it's 83.1 years in Roland Park, the city's richest neighborhood – where most households have more than one car. That's a twenty-year gap in life expectancy.
The Maryland Transportation Authority (MTA), which operated the Key Bridge, often neglects the needs of lower-income people. An electronic EZ-Pass is required to pay tolls, for example, and they are difficult to obtain without a bank account. (The Federal Reserve reports that 13 percent of Black households are unbanked.)
The MTA's floundering "traffic relief plan," crafted under Hogan, would have increased traffic in parts of the DC area and raised tolls for many drivers through a "public-private investment" that would have siphoned off highway revenue for private profit and imposed "dynamic pricing" –surge pricing that could change as often as every five minutes, driving tolls out of the reach of many area residents. It would also have given a private company control over more than 100 miles of the DC area's high-speed lanes.
Fortunately, Hogan's privatization scheme floundered after pushback from local officials and his Democratic successor. So has his other "public-private partnership," the Purple Line. But the intent was clear — and it was not to serve the Black, Brown, and White lower-income people of Maryland.
Transportation was even used against high school students during the 2015 protests over the police killing of Freddie Gray. As MacGillis writes,
"Just after Freddie Gray's memorial service had concluded, and headed for Mondawmin Mall, the transit hub for some 5,000 of them, they found several hundred police waiting ... They also found that the bus lines through the hub were suspended, as was service at the Mondawmin subway station ..."
"It was almost as if authorities were trying to engineer the confrontation that ensued between the growing mass of stranded youths and the outnumbered cops," MacGillis adds.
But these are merely the latest battles in a war that has lasted for four hundred years. The Susquehannock people were hunting in what is now Baltimore when Europeans declared the Province of Maryland in 1634. They soon became refugees in their own native land. The scattered bands that survived eventually merged into other tribes – which were also driven from the region.
Call it the first drive-by.
As we remember those who lost their lives in the bridge disaster, let's not forget the people who are killed by structural violence every day in Baltimore.
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While Immigrants Die to Repair Bridges, US Politicians Risk Lives by Building Walls
The lives of Miguel and the five other workers filling potholes on Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge have been cut short, but the hatred of immigrants, sadly, is alive, well and growing this election year.
Mar 29, 2024
Immigrants helped build this country, a fact no amount of racism or xenophobia can erase. Immigrants, including children, work in fields and factories, driving our economy. A group of immigrant men were working late last Tuesday night, filling potholes on Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge.
At 1:27 am, the Dali, a massive cargo vessel, 948-feet long and laden with roughly 4,700 shipping containers, lost power and rammed into the bridge, causing it to collapse. Two survived the disaster, six died. Only two of their bodies have been recovered from the cold, murky water of the Patapsco River.
Their tragic deaths occurred as increased immigrant arrivals are being exploited by former President Donald Trump and his right-wing extremist allies to foment division and to boost Trump’s presidential campaign. Just hours after the bridge collapse, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, interviewing Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott, attempted to link the maritime disaster to immigrants at the U.S.’ southern border:
“I want to understand the threats or the potential threats that this country is facing right now given the wide open border, the fact that we don’t know who is in the country. The FBI is looking… to ensure there was no foul play.”
“While we’re being talked about as like this invading horde that’s coming to destroy the country, what does this story actually show us? That immigrants are filling our potholes at night so that we can have a smooth drive to work in the morning.”
This is the same dog-whistle racism that Trump invoked in 2015, launching his first campaign: “When Mexico sends its people…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Trump continues his white supremacist ranting, saying at a recent Ohio campaign rally, “I don’t know if you call them people… These are animals and we have to stop it.”
Maximillian Alvarez, editor-in-chief of the Baltimore-based Real News Network, interviewed coworkers of the deceased. He said on the Democracy Now! news hour, “While we’re being talked about as like this invading horde that’s coming to destroy the country, what does this story actually show us? That immigrants are filling our potholes at night so that we can have a smooth drive to work in the morning.”
The six who died while working on the Key Bridge were hardworking men, from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Miguel Luna was a welder, a 49-year-old father and grandfather, a native of the Usulután Department in El Salvador, ravaged by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military and paramilitaries in the 1980s. He played on the professional soccer team in the town of Berlin in his home region. His widow, Maria del Carmen, owns a food truck. Miguel was a beloved member of his community.
Miguel and another victim of the collapse, Maynor Suazo Sandoval, were members of CASA, an immigrant rights non-profit founded in 1986 to build solidarity with those impacted by the U.S.-backed violence in Central America. CASA wrote, “Maynor migrated from Honduras over 17 years ago, and he alongside his brother Carlos were active members in the activist committee of Owings Mills… Carlos said ‘He was always so full of joy, and brought so much humor to our family.’ He was a husband, and father of two.”
Details are still emerging of the other named victims, Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, of Mexico and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, of Guatemala. Their bodies were found inside a pickup truck, submerged in the river. Two more victims, also reportedly from Mexico and Guatemala, remain unnamed by their respective governments.
Millions of enslaved people also built this country, a point worth remembering as we mourn the immigrant laborers on the Key Bridge. The bridge was named after Francis Scott Key since, while watching the British navy bombard Fort McHenry in 1814, not far from where the bridge was built in the 1970s, Key wrote the poem that would become the national anthem. His poem has four stanzas, the first made famous as “The Star Spangled Banner.” Key was a slave owner, and denounced those who fled enslavement in 1814 to fight against the United States, for the British, who promised them freedom in return.
“No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,” Key wrote in his poem, words left out of the national anthem, but which nevertheless noticeably rhyme with “Land of the free and home of the brave.” This should be considered by those tasked with naming the replacement bridge.
The lives of Miguel and the five other workers have been cut short, but the hatred of immigrants, sadly, is alive, well and growing this election year. Pledges from President Joe Biden to quickly open Baltimore’s port to commerce parallel campaign rhetoric on both sides to “shut down” the southern border to people seeking asylum.
“Immigrants like Miguel are building bridges to connect communities, not building walls to divide them,” CASA wrote, eulogizing Miguel Luna. Let those words inspire an embrace of immigrant communities, an anthem we can all rally around.
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