The Rose Street community center consists of a bunch of houses and apartments around 27th and Madison. This neighborhood lies a few blocks away from the Johns Hopkins hospital and medical campus. When I set up my appointment with Mr.Walker and Mr.Guyton, I was unprepared for the striking contrast in environs I would see. Just a block away from the medical school library you could see the entire neighborhood change. The medical school is a beautiful place with lots of glass panelled buildings. One of the buildings looks like this:


By the time I had reached 27th and Madison the surroundings had transformed completely. There were actually people just hanging around outside, chatting. Ice cream trucks were clamouring in the distance. This neighborhood looked like this:


Sitting outside your house is something we loved to do back in India. In Baltimore, I see this only in the poorer neighborhoods. I don't sit outside myself, and as a result I barely know my neighbors. Maybe it's just that I don't have that kind of time?

Anyway, I reached 27th and Madison. I felt a little apprehensive to be there; but still I was reassured because I knew I would be meeting Mr.Guyton or Mr.Walker. If anyone accosted me, I would tell them I knew Mr.Walker, I thought to myself and smiled. Surprising how confident you feel in a strange place when you know someone there.

I met Mr.Walker on the street, he was sitting outside with some friends. He ushered me into a small apartment. It was, he said, "a level 1" house. It's a small house that looked like this:

It was where he lived, and where they brought people who have just been released from prison to live. They stay in the house and are given the job of cleaning up the neighborhoods. Eventually, Mr.Walker said they wanted these men to feel like free citizens. They wanted the men to become free thinkers. Mr.Walker used that phrase often: free thinkers. I noted that phrase to ask him about it later. Did the men have any family? Some men do, some men were from out of town and were subpoenaed here. Some men didn't have any family.

I described my project to him. I told him how I was moved by his account of his life and transformation when he talked at an event of the Season for Non-violence. He replied, "Oh yeah, the Gandhi Martin Luther King thing". I told him that I wanted to understand what they do, and take the message back to my community - the campus community.

I asked him to show me around, so that I can experience the environs and get an idea. We walked around the street. He showed me some other apartments that they were acquiring. They were "level 2 and 3 " houses, where the men would be completely responsible for their upkeep.

Then he told me how they work. They wanted the men to participate in society. They would have group discussions, come up with ideas of what to do. He said that they emphasize equality everywhere. Because the first thing that the men learn when they go to prison is the inequality of how they are treated. Mr. Walker said they needed to learn that they were equal. I recalled the part in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, when the protagonist (a murderer) experiences a similar feeling of being inferior to a police officer who is unaware of the murder.

What did he mean by freedom, I asked him. Doesn't being free mean doing what you want? Then how can you feel free by living a structured life, I asked. He replied that the mind needs some structure to exist in. Some structures have a positive expression, they allow the mind to be free. Some others only enchain the mind and are negative. For example, he said, non-violence is a structure. It allows freedom. And freedom is physical, emotional and spiritual. That is why they stressed the role of faith.

Then I told him about how our university had responded to Chris Elser's death, and I told him that I could see how these issues were interconnected. His reaction showed that he cared a lot about this issue. He said he was was concerned with how the city responded to homicides. He said the purely negative response of the city showed how it reflects to him their underlying beliefs and values about life. "Negative plus negative will only be negative", he said.

He told me about his petition to the city. He sued the Baltimore city in 2003 for a dollar. He showed me the letters, and the response of the city, dismissing his case as having a "frivolous nature". How can they think that the issue is frivolous, he said, when there were 300 people dying in the city each year? And Mayor O'Malley pledged that he would reduce the number to 175 by 2004. Mr.Walker was indignant that they should attach a number to the homicides, as if 175 lives lost is not a big deal.

He gave the example of Hurricane Isabel. Even though the damages could not be predicted, the Mayor set aside all the resources he could to prevent any loss of life. Yet, when 300 people die each year of "a storm called homicide", they were not putting enough resources towards this. I asked him if the press had reported this lawsuit in the media. He said yes they did, and he would show me a feature that Channel 2 had done on this.

It's indeed curious how much death we can endure when we are used to it. But when they all happen in one day we go into a tizzy.

Undeterred, he had sued the city in 2004 once again. Once again, it was dismissed. He said that in the civil courts, he could keep suing the city till the end of his life. I was amazed because this was exactly the kind of civil agitation that Martin Luther King would have done.

I told him that maybe if many many people would sue the city, it might make a big difference. I asked him if maybe he could get the entire neighborhood to sue the city. He replied that they would do that when the time came.

Finally, I set up an appointment for the following week, so that we could meet with some other men, and interview them. I walked my way back to the rich city.

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