The neighborhood where I grew up is gone forever — effaced from the planet as if it never existed. The physical location, a longitude and latitude on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, is still there, to be sure but there is no vestige of the community, the people who made the neighborhood sing when I was growing up there in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Presently, West Baltimore’s surface bears some similarities to the current state of my Mt.Pleasant neighborhood in Cleveland - the desolation, the abandoned buildings, the blight of the drug trade and the desperation it represents are visible in both places. But there is an important difference in West Baltimore. In West Baltimore, the traditions and the people who practice them are still there, and the neighborhood basks in moments of glory when people come out and celebrate who they are and where they are. These moments are the visible signs of a profound phenomenon: they are signs of a lived heritage. They are also signs of a people surviving in the interstices of an institutional gridwork that has largely ignored their needs and, so far, their contribution to our common culture has gone unacknowledged. These unheeding economic and political forces haven’t acknowledged West Baltimore’s existence as a worthy community and in a self-fulfilling gesture, they would make a living neighborhood into just another empty geographic location - a community to be dispersed, their lands to be redeveloped and repopulated, as though they were empty space to be filled by new residents whose only ties to the land are determined by the marketplace. This would be a terrible tragedy - West Baltimore remains a place populated by people, and, with their traditions still intact, the people of West Baltimore can and do work a magical transformation of the space they tenaciously continue to occupy and this magic can be made to extend far beyond the borders of Baltimore.

West Baltimore has huge potential to be developed as a special place, for the people who live there now, but also for African American people Americans at large and for the world. American music traditions brought together black and white people in the United States and they are beloved throughout the world. The songs of the Civil Rights Movement, rhythm and blues, acappella styles like doo-wop, black sacred song, jazz - have deep and present roots in West Baltimore. Genres and performative practices like movement and dance, outdoor concerts, festivals and parades are all indigenous to West Baltimore. And West Baltimore is a repository for all of these practices which have so much significance for so many people.

West Baltimore has a lesson and a promise for us all. Their example teaches us that people, traditions and spiritual sustenance are at least as important as material things. The promise is that, as long as these traditions continue to be performed - maybe, with hard work and commitment to a special place and its people, just maybe, we can go home again - to West Baltimore.

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