Tori Yorgey
WBAL TV 11
An event at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum Thursday night allowed the community to reflect on the decade that has passed since Freddie Gray’s death.
Gray was arrested on April 12, 2015, and died a week later after suffering injuries while in Baltimore Police custody.
Freddie Gray & The Baltimore Uprising: 10 Years Later Reflecting, Reckoning and Rebuilding, a two-day symposium, is presented by Murphy, Falcon & Murphy.
“It’s important that we commemorate this event, and so we felt like we are part of the community and being a center of the community,” said Robert Parker, chief curator and director of the visitor experience and education at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. “It gives us time to commemorate the story and to make sure we connect that story to the public. It’s a reckoning, its reconciliation, it’s remembering, it is healing. So, for us, I think we’re the perfect gathering space to have such an event as this.”
The Gray family attorney, William “Billy” Murphy Jr., was one of several panelists who weighed in and reflected on the past 10 years.
“There were so many things that happened as a result of Freddie Gray’s death. The feds came in, the attorney general herself, Loretta Lynch, ordered an investigation by the federal government of Baltimore Police Department. They found all kinds of wrongdoing,” Murphy said. “The police (were) put under consent decree, and they had to change their ways. So far, that has been an encouraging part of this. But this is still Baltimore, people are still suffering, and nothing is being done to lift up people in the past 10 years since Freddie Gray’s death.”
Murphy said numerous demonstrations, police body-worn cameras and an uncommon prosecution of six Baltimore police officers were a few things that came after the death of Gray.
Janice Bledsoe, a former deputy at the State’s Attorney’s Office to Marilyn Mosby, was part of the prosecution. However, no officers were ever convicted in the case.
“I think that the police had their narrative, it was unheard of to charge police officers. (Six in this case), for this type of death. He never regained consciousness. It was unheard of to charge police officers for not taking care of a prisoner. For ignoring his pleas for help, for ignoring the fact that he said he couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t like they didn’t know that he was in medical stress,” Bledsoe said. “It was a tough case, but it was an important one because we need to hold police accountable. I think that started a good trajectory.”
“I see Freddie Gray’s death as a sacrifice, an unwanted sacrifice. But the people of Baltimore were not going to let his death be in vain. So out of that tragedy came a lot of good,” said Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., Thursday night’s panel moderator and a former head of the NAACP. “I think it’s good to reflect. But, out of this reflection, I want to project a future for Baltimore, and that’s why I agreed to be a moderator.”
“I think it’s fairly mixed. An organization like mine, with our kind of radical political sensibilities typically are marginalized from mainstream political discourse,” said panelist Dayvon Love, director of public policy with Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a grassroots organization. “When we think about the uprising and opened up that political space where certain voices, that usually would be curated out of the conversation, were now thrust into a place where we could be a political consequence carrying this perspective.”