“A city wakes up in pain amidst the billowing smoke of deceit and dreams incinerated.”

How many times have I heard it? “I just love what they have done to Baltimore—the stadium and the inner harbor.” No doubt, many of same folks would say they love The Wire, too. But if they were asked to match the devastation of deindustrialization with a single city, Detroit would win hands down.

Baltimoreans share these bifurcated allegiances. Who doesn’t love a coliseum that so ably represents a city’s history of industry and hard work, even as one wonders how the metropolis will survive its gentrification?

I should have known my Facebook musing on a smoldering city would be touched by our schizophrenia about the cause of Baltimore’s troubles.

I listed a chain of legendary industrial workplaces that have long been shuttered, beginning with Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point Plant, where I spent 30 years, most of them as an activist and representative of the United Steelworkers.

The plant, which, after Bethlehem’s bankruptcy in 2002, had been traded off in a corporate poker game between several owners, has been shut down for two years, idling more than 2,000 workers.

Just a few weeks ago, the 3,200-acre facility’s towering blast furnace –one of the world’s largest when it was built, a landmark that carried a star seen for miles each Christmas, one I memorialized in a poem–was imploded, spreading as much pain as finality.

So, I asked my Facebook friends what happens when dozens of legendary plants that employed hundreds of thousands, workplaces like General Motors, Western Electric, Armco Steel and Lever Brothers shut down.

I asked what happens when apologists for the outsourcers and “free” traders and financiers say not to worry. Good, clean jobs will open up. Young people locked out of opportunity will find bright futures. A rusty city will gleam. What happens?

My answer: “A city wakes up in pain amidst the billowing smoke of deceit and dreams incinerated.”

The “likes” poured in. In the narcissist vein of Facebook, I felt important and persuasive.

It took a former co-worker only a few seconds to burst my boast. Rob accused me of “making excuses” for rioting groups of inner city residents who “won’t take accountability for their own lives.”

I responded to him civilly. I said accountability for a polarized, suffering city should be expansive, encompassing the decisions not just of the folks at the bottom, but those of the wealthy and powerful, with a bit of introspection on the part of the rest of us.

“Accountability for their own lives.” I thought back on the struggle that had already been raging in the courts over discrimination in the steel industry when I was hired in 1973, one brilliantly preserved in a video, “Struggles in Steel,” by Braddock, Pa., steelworker sons Tony Buba and Ray Henderson.

Black workers had always been assigned to the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in the mills. And they would lose their seniority if they transferred out to majority white departments, starting out at the bottom again, at the beck and call of the boom and the bust.

Years of lawsuits, rallies and lobbying had finally resulted in a consent decree that provided for reforming seniority systems and opening up trade and craft jobs to minority workers and women.

The Civil Rights Movement had spread into basic industries.

Black steelworkers from Birmingham, Ala. to Lackawanna, N.Y. and Baltimore took “accountability for their own lives.”

They didn’t always fight alone. One of my proudest recollections was accompanying 300 coke oven workers, mostly senior black workers from the hell hole of the mill, but accompanied by a notable infusion of more recent hires, many of them white guys who had come home from Vietnam.

Decked out in overalls and safety shoes, they blew through the doors and security of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington where their union leaders were meeting to demand support in winning cleaner conditions and higher incentive pay. And, after a brief wildcat strike when they returned home, they won.

Skilled jobs had been off limits to black workers for decades. For a time, while attending the local community college, I interviewed some of these co-workers as part of a co-op curriculum toward my paralegal degree.

Their stories were heart-rending. A Korean War veteran related how he worked as a plane mechanic in the Air Force, but was flunked when he took the millwright’s test at the Point, even while less-qualified whites entered that department.

So he became a laborer, stacking up ungodly hours of overtime on man-killing assignments to equal and surpass the paychecks he could have made had he been able to move into a skilled position.

I’ll never forget the words of Francis Brown, one of the leaders of Steel and Shipyard Workers for Equality, a leading organization of black workers at the Point:

“When a white guy needs an electrician or a plumber, he calls his brother or brother-in-law,” said Brown. “Black workers call the white contractor.”

But the consent decree mandate on integrating the skilled trades came too late for many as the U.S. steel industry went into decline in the 1980s. Overseas competitors targeted this nation’s market and our trade and tax policy compromised U.S. workers and producers.

The damage from steel’s decline was inequitably apportioned.

At Sparrows Point and the other mills, the legacy of Jim Crow, of white workers threatening to strike if black workers moved into skilled positions, of supervisors and managers who relished and help perpetuate the divisions between the races, persisted.

So the skilled trades remained overwhelmingly white even as the crisis within the industry intensified.

Today, as former steelworkers fan out looking for work—some traveling as far as Texas—the more skilled are recovering upwards of 65 to 75 percent of their former salaries, while their peers in production jobs lag far, far behind, leaving them less able to hang onto their homes or send their children to college. Their family wealth is sinking.

Surely my white co-worker would think it’s preposterous to suggest any link between Baltimore’s industrial and housing segregation and the fiery streets of 2015 after the death of Freddie Gray. Despite his own bout with unemployment, he would think it equally preposterous to attribute the 37 percent unemployment among black youth to anything other than their parents’ bad choices.

The power of a job, not just as a means to a living, but also as a bond between people, a space of solidarity, dialogue and action

But life forever reminds us that inequality has consequences. Its damage survives until it is uprooted by the formidable claws of legal and moral pressure, recognition and activism.

Here, in the home of The Wire, a hollowed out, deindustrialized city that never came to terms with its own legacy of racism in its workplaces, housing and communities has reached its inevitable breaking point.

I remember attending meetings of black steelworkers at a social club off North Avenue in northeast Baltimore, not far from Johns Hopkins Hospital. The club was in a row house in a stable, clean neighborhood full of workers from local industries.

Fast forward 40 years—only a few blocks from the place where tough men and their lawyers plotted a strategy to challenge a Fortune 500 corporation is a corner that lays claim to one of the highest homicide rates in the U.S.

A mayor and a U.S. president denounce the “thugs” and criminals who burn and loot.

I’m appalled when my ears resonate with “thug,” but my eyes take in TV images of young high school students, in their khaki uniforms taking to the streets.

I can’t blame Mayor Rawlings-Blake or President Obama for their thug talk.

African-Americans only survive in political office when they are perceived by whites as the best carriers of the stern rod of discipline, as the enforcers of accountability.

I think about what the future will hold for the young folks who are taking their passion to the streets of Baltimore. And I recall a poignant conversation years ago between two co-workers in the mill.

One had been in the streets after the assassination of Dr. King in 1968. His white co-worker was out there, too—as a member of the Maryland National Guard.

After 1968, they each started families and found decent-paying union jobs at Bethlehem Steel with benefits and security.

They became active in their communities as coaches and PTA officers. And they became friends.

I think about these two co-workers as I watch proud citizens and courageous leaders like U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings and local pastors working to heal their communities. I wonder how many neighborhood elders who are sweeping up the glass and exhorting the young to protest non-violently have their roots in steel and auto and can manufacturing, shipbuilding, and unions.

And I consider the power of a job, not just as a means to a living, but also as a bond between people, as a space of solidarity, dialogue and action.

Where are the jobs for the young people some so swiftly label “thugs?”

Where is our accountability to the legacy of the men and women who came to Baltimore from North and South Carolina and Virginia and sacrificed to build a future where the economic playing field was level and dreams could be nurtured?

Where is our accountability to the young people, from Baltimore and across America who, today, mourn Freddie Gray and demand our attention and our answers?

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