"Oh my, God, he just threw a chair in that window!” exclaimed the student on the phone. “I’m going home, Professor. I gotta get back to City Hall. That’s where my ride’s supposed to meet me.”
I kept her on the line a few minutes longer than she wanted to be and made her describe the route she was planning to walk from the Inner Harbor to get to her pickup spot. All I could think about was that I didn’t want her to get caught up in the melee that was starting, but I finally ended our conversation when she promised to call me from the car. Then I looked up at the television screen that I was watching to monitor a local station’s live broadcast and saw the student with whom I was just talking dart past a gathering crowd as she began to make her way home.
Long before violence and looting erupted in Baltimore after Freddie Gray’s death in police custody we had sufficiently primed the pump for our students, preparing them to cover the story that became top national news as it was happening in their backyard.
Journalistically speaking, we could not have manufactured a more model assignment than what developed in April in the wake of the death of a 26-year-old man in the custody of police, the arrest caught on video in one of the city’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods.
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Morgan students march to a police station at the edge of Morgan's campus to protest the death of Freddie Gray, a detainee who died while in police custody. (Photo courtesy of the MSU Spokesman)