One in a Million at the Million Man March

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Oct. 25, 1995

As a white guy, Im pretty much at the top of Minister Louis Farrakhan’s shit list. The Nation of Islam leader may hurl venom at Jews, Arabs, Catholics, gays, and any other group that his twisted, manipulative take on history and reality tells him to excoriate, but a large supply of his vast reservoir of hate is reserved for Caucasian men.

Knowing exactly where I stand in Farrakhan’s separatist vision – that is, sequestered from my African American friends and neighbors – I decided to attend the Million Man March to get a sense of the future of black-white relations. I do, after all, live happily in an integrated neighborhood of a majority-black city where race is constantly an issue. If my welcome is wearing thin, I’d prefer to find out earlier than later.

Being uninvited and considered part of the problem, I expected hostility. To my pleasant surprise, I was welcomed over the course of the day by hundreds of African American men, who politely acknowledged my presence even as they listened to blame-filled speeches that fingered me, a white male, for much of their plight. I was called “brother,” and clasped hands in an overwhelmingly positive spirit with black men in Farrakhan T-shirts. I quickly realized that, in the atmosphere of the march, race relations were much more complex and promising than the hype had led me to believe.

Race, it seems to me, is not a simple black-and-white issue, though many choose to see it that way. Its nuances are dizzying. As I tried to piece it together, I quickly grew to resent the words of Dan Berger, which I had read on the op-ed pages of The Sun that morning: “If you do not accept the leadership of Minister Farrakhan and Reverend [Benjamin] Chavis, you are not marching in Washington today. If you are, you did.” I now realize that Farrakhan’s leadership is a sideshow to the real strides toward multiethnic health that March participants took with great enthusiasm.

As I wandered the Mall, I listened to speeches and prayers, delivered by Nation of Islam ministers and Christian preachers, that reminded me repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that my European American forefathers were slave traders, or slave owners, and that they conspired – often with ruthless energy over a period of centuries – to enrich themselves at the expense of the inhabitants of much of the African continent. Strong cases were made, even without indulging the minister’s bizarre fantasies, that this white racist legacy against African American males continues in more subtle forms today.

Even without the reminders, I am fully conscious of my forefathers’ sins and those of today’s white-male establishment. And I know that they are not far removed, either in time or space, from my own experience. I will never forget Mining the Museum, an exhibit created by Fred Wilson at the Maryland Historical Society that included a Klansman’s hood found in a Towson attic in the late 1950s and a fugitive slave notice from a farm on Falls Road in Brooklandville (owned today by the same family, the Johnsons, who were listed on the notice) which included a description of how the runaway had been marked for identification purposes by mutilation.

I grew up in that same area, just north of the city. Cold, hard, violent racism is an unavoidable part of my heritage. Occasional conversations with some of my childhood friends never fail to remind me of its living, breathing effect; many of them cultivate a racist mentality even as they say they aren’t racists. They often try to tone it down in my presence, but their educated voices still resonate with destructive words and thoughts. I tolerate their company at these times with grim defiance and open discomfort; nonetheless, they are my friends, and I still like them.

A visit to almost any corner bar in the southern or eastern reaches of this city, where many of the city’s whites reside, is likely to reveal an innate animosity towards African Americans that, in a feat of logical gymnastics, is felt to be justified by the ongoing crisis of black-on-black drug violence. Overlooked is the obvious fact that the government’s drug war targets poor, urban black males even as white suburbanites feed the trade and traffic with little fear of arrest or prosecution. When I pass by a drug corner, the excitement among the black dealers is feverish: a white face means a quick sale without the haggle. Somehow the white role in black-on-black drug violence is lost on most whites.

Many whites in Baltimore, despite living under a legal system that matured to embrace civil rights generations ago, are still in infancy when it comes to race relations. As further evidence, one only needs to remember the Democratic primary for city council president. Joe DiBlasi captured many white voters’ imaginations by overtly seeking to exploit the potential split in the city’s black vote among three African-American candidates. As he sought citywide office, he rarely if ever campaigned in black communities.

Even as the city’s white community complained rightly and bitterly about Mayor Kurt Schmoke’s race-based campaign, hardly a white voice was raised against DiBlasi for the same tactic. To me, this mass hypocrisy is every bit as great as that of Schmoke and his campaign manager, Larry Gibson. It seems to me that the city’s black political leadership and much of its white minority population are on the same racist page: they are just reading different books. Both call for retribution. One side tries to undermine black leadership because those on that side feel ignored; the other proudly proclaims that the shoe is now on the other foot. The situation make productive communication all but impossible.

And the situation with Farrakhan doesn’t help matters. He is a racist, plain and simple, and he is emerging as the dominant voice – if not the acknowledged leader – of African American males. At the march, I witnessed hundreds of thousands raise their fists and make a vow: “We accept Louis Farrakhan as our leader across the world.” Needless to say, that spectacle worries me profoundly.

But I know I can live with the hostility that Farrakhan wants to spread. He’s taken the fore as a highly visible and controversial black leader, so I have little choice but to deal with it. The trick – as in any confrontational situation – is not to take it personally, to deflect any blows, and not to hit back. Most of all, love your brother anyway. Eventually, he backs down, the hatchet is buried, and everyone gets along famously. At last that’s how it is supposed to go.

The hostility-deflection method takes patience and practiced level-headedness, but it works in most situations, as any martial-arts instructor worth his or her salt can tell you. I have gotten rather practiced at it, as I face black-to-white hostility on nearly a daily basis on the streets of Baltimore (constant eye-fucking, the occasional “yo, white bitch,” and periodic attempts to run me down on the street). In fact, I had to deploy it almost immediately upon returning to Baltimore from the march.

As I crossed West Franklin Street heading north on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (of all places), I found myself confronted with a baseball-bat-wielding youth, maybe 10 years old, backed up by four other kids. They came running across MLK from the Lexington Terrace projects, itching to kick my ass.

Unable to avoid them, I stopped my bike, stood up, faced the kid as he prepared to bash me with the bat, and said sternly with my arms crossed, “So you’re going to knock me around, huh?” He balked, smiled sheepishly, and then one of his accomplices shouted, “He’s a cop! Look, he’s packin’ a gun!”

That was their out. As they ran east on Franklin, I shouted after them, “You wouldn’t have pulled that shit if you had gone to the march today!” The last kid looked back and smiled knowingly.

I had disarmed them psychically, and each of us left undamaged and with something positive to think about. It occurred to me the march participants had managed the same thing with me earlier that day: I had gone expecting my presence to cause some level of hostility and confrontation, but I found only peace and brotherhood.

My hope is that Minister Louis Farrakhan, as he makes his rounds as a confrontational black leader, will find the same reception that I found at the march. If his hostility is met with hostility, I’m afraid we’re headed for a highly destructive showdown. If it is deflected with respectful defiance laced with genuine benevolence, maybe there’s hope, and blacks, whites, and everyone else can stop talking about blame and retribution and actually start building a common, mutually beneficial future. To rephrase the popular T-shirt, “It’s a people thing – we got to understand.”

Harm City

By Van Smith

Published as a “Postmark: Baltimore” column in New York Press, 1998

Back in August 1996, when I moved into the house I recently purchased, my next-door neighbors appeared to be a problem. A bullethole still marred a windowframe of their rented house, left there after a Sunday afternoon shootout on the street a few months earlier. They kept seven chows in the basement; you could hear the inbred curs barking in the dark, day and night. About a dozen people used the house as a temporary crash pad on a rotating basis – younger guys, mostly, with shiny Acuras and eye-fucking attitudes. The landlord lived in New York City and apparently was waiting for the bank to foreclose on the property so he wouldn’t have to be responsible for the shady scene going down on his property.

Within weeks of moving in, I noted a connection between my next-door neighbors and the barbershop around the corner. Fresh Cuttz, it was called. Open all night, its barber chairs were always full and lots of traffic moved through its doors. Late at night, flashy cars with out-of-state license plates were often double-parked before its entrance. Directly in front of the shop was a payphone, a well-placed utility for the high-volume retail drug trade spreading a half block in either direction. I regularly saw many of the guys who lived next door to me hanging in or around Fresh Cuttz.

I was curious, so I asked around. Although many neighborhood people said they had complained to the police about drug dealing they believed was originating from Fresh Cuttz, no one had any information about cops ever having busted the joint. The police, for their part, said three separate investigations had reached the same conclusions: Fresh Cuttz was a place where drug dealers went to get their haircuts, end of story. This made the neighborhood people laugh cynically. Some were of the honest opinion that police were connected to the drug dealing there.

Around this time, an FBI agent who works the press in Baltimore started warming up to me. He would call regularly, friendly as can be, probably in an attempt to get information about the things I look into as an investigative reporter. I never gave him anything that hadn’t already been printed, but he would call me anyway to chat about local politics. When he started offering personal information about himself – where he lives, where he went to high school – I figured he was extending a measure of trust. Not wanting to be needlessly paranoid in dealing with a federal agent, I returned this gesture by telling him the location of my new abode.

“That would be right around the corner from Fresh Cuttz, right?” the FBI guy asked. I was amazed that he would be aware of the place. After plugging him for more information, I learned that Fresh Cuttz caused a blip on the radar screen of a federal investigation of convicted money-launderer Gregory Scroggins. Court records show that Scroggins drove an undercover FBI agent posing a DC drug dealer looking to hide money in Baltimore real estate straight from the Downtown Athletic Club to Fresh Cuttz. Just as he was pulling up to the barbershop, ostensibly to meet with a potential co-investor, Scroggins noticed the suited white men tailing him in an unmarked car, so he took off. The operation failed, but my FBI guy, who was in charge of the investigation, was convinced Fresh Cuttz was somehow connected to the potential co-investor, who name was Kenneth Antonio “Bird” Jackson.

I got quite a rush from this information. Earlier that year, I had written about Jackson. I reported that he was a strip-club manager who, along with his mother, was trying to get a liquor license for a major new downtown nightclub apparently by using a surrogate applicant and the interventions of controversial state Sen. Larry Young. Jackson himself, an ex-con who says his violent days as a leading figure in Baltimore’s west-side drug trade are over, was not legally permitted to hold a liquor license, so he was attempting the next best thing: using a high school guidance counselor with a clean record as the licensee. The scandal exposed not only Jackson’s past crimes and current shenanigans with the liquor board, but also his shoulder-rubbing with some of Baltimore’s most powerful political leaders. If the folks living next to me were associated with Jackson – as it now seemed they were – I had good reason to be paranoid.

After the article ran, my publisher got a letter from New York attorney Robert Simels, who not only counsels jailed New York gangster Henry Hyde, but also my new-found nemesis, Kenny Jackson. On Jackson’s behalf, Simels was threatening to sue me and my employer, Baltimore’s City Paper, for libel. He never followed through, but I was very impressed that Jackson would have such an expensive attorney pen such a piss-poor letter to my publisher. I would have expected the threat to come from Jackson’s esteemed local attorney, Piper & Marbury’s George Russell, a former judge, city solicitor and president of the Maryland Bar Association. Jackson seemed to be saying, “See, I can afford the costliest – just like Henry Hyde.”

Jackson can afford more than expensive attorneys. He has given thousands to the campaign coffers of the city’s three top political leaders: Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, City Council President Lawrence Bell (who got $3500 from Jackson, his largest contributor) and Comptroller Joan Pratt. He bankrolled a political action committee, called A Piece of J.U.I.C.E. (Justice, Unity, Integrity, Choice, Equality), which was formed to give people on the streets of Baltimore – many of whom can’t vote because they, like Jackson, have felony convictions – a voice in the political process. J.U.I.C.E. spends thousands among the city and state politicians.

Perhaps the contributions explain Jackson’s extraordinary access. At a birthday party for a politician’s mother last fall, Jackson was the only person there – other than the mother – who wasn’t either an elected official or an elected official’s employee or spouse, according to a person who was at the celebration. A plaque from former U.S. representative and now NAACP President Kweisi Mfume hangs over Jackson’s desk in his backroom office at his strip club, the Eldorado Gentlemen’s Club.

The existence of Kenny Jackson explains a lot about Baltimore’s political culture. He has everyone who knows him convinced that he’s just a businessman, an ex-con trying to redeem himself by making legal money in the entertainment business. And maybe that’s all he is. But then there’s the matter of Scroggins (who, by the way, is widely said to be the father of Mayor Schmoke’s adopted son), caught on a wiretap calling Jackson “the nicest guy in the world, but he’s a killer and he has killed.” (Jackson was once convicted of manslaughter, and later beat a murder charge in New York.) Meanwhile, Jackson is making cash overtures to the city’s political elite. And the elite is not shying away from him by any means.

“Mr. Jackson is a businessman, that’s all I have to say,” City Council President Bell told me after the scandal erupted.

The lingering question after hearing such a statement is, Which business is he in, entertainment or drugs? Even if Jackson no longer controls a sizeable chunk of the Baltimore drug trade, as law-enforcement officials speaking background insist he does, he has this very sinister history involving large sums of cash, guns and white powder. It seems that in Baltimore it is okay for politicians to be associated with people like Kenny Jackson. No one gets outraged about it; rather, folks generally seem fascinated by the details without having any sense that something is fundamentally amiss. Perhaps this numbness has been learned after living with generations of corrupt leaders. After all, this is the state that produced such stalwarts of integrity as Spiro Agnew and still displays his bust in the state Capitol.

If you run the numbers on the size of the local drug trade, you begin to understand why Baltimoreans might tend to write off their leaders as corrupt. The city health department says there are 50,000 daily users of heroin or cocaine in Baltimore city – a conservative estimate, I’d say. Let’s assume each of them spends $50 per day to support his habit – also a conservative estimate. And this goes on 365 days a year. That’s 50,000 times 50 times 365, or $912.5 million a year. Money is power, politicians love power, so people tend to presume some of this money must somehow be getting into some politicians’ pockets. The easiest way for average citizens to deal with this possibility is to accept it and go on with their lives. Who’s going to shut down a $912 million-a-year industry? An outraged citizenry? No way, especially since so much of the citizenry creates the demand that fuels that industry.

On Jan. 3, 1997, Fresh Cuttz made the news. James Smith, III, a three-year-old sitting in a barber chair to get his birthday haircut, was killed in the crossfire of a shootout inside the barbershop. The police investigation concluded that the violence was over stolen shirts. Smith’s death caused a widespread spasm of hand-wringing in a city that consistently rates in the top 10, per capita, for murders. Media coverage of the murder stressed the tragedy not only of Smith’s death, but of the barbershop owner’s victimization; these were legitimate businesspeople, the media reported, who had the misfortune of having senseless violence visit their innocent premises. Following the murder, Fresh Cuttz shut down, and so did the drug market in my neighborhood.

The guys next door with the chows, they moved out a few months before the Smith murder; the house is now owned by a bank and is vacant. Kenny Jackson is laying low at the Eldorado, where his butt-slapping variety show is shot on video for the city’s public-access cable channel. His buddy Larry Young – the state senator who tried to help Jackson negotiate the liquor board – was just expelled from the state Senate in early January for breaking ethics laws by using his public office for fun and profit. Schmoke, Bell and Pratt are all still in power, trying their level best – but to no good effect – to turn “Harm City” back into “Charm City.”

For my part, I own a fully functional, three-story, historic storefront row house with an oversized backyard located within 10 blocks of the city center for $34,500. I don’t think that kind of money would buy a parking space in Manhattan.

Rendering Unto Oprah: How Dead Pets, Bad Brains, and Free Speech Landed Me in Amarillo

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Mar. 11, 1998

Bored and listless in the morning heat of Labor Day 1994, I jumped on an opportunity to catch a Hagerstown Suns minor-league baseball game with a friend. Oddly enough, this spur-of-the-moment foray into Western Maryland marked the beginning of a saga that eventually led me, 3 1/2 years later, to Amarillo, Texas, where I testified last month in the U.S. District Court case of Texas Beef Group vs. Oprah Winfrey.

Sitting next to us that Labor Day afternoon in Hagerstown’s Municipal Stadium were two guys who said they were truck drivers for the local rendering plant, where, they explained, ingredients for dry pet food are made partly from dead pets they pick up from the local chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

We were at once aghast, amused, and skeptical. “No, really, it’s true,” they said blandly, sensing our doubts. “We pick up dead pets from the SPCA and take them to the plant. The plant cooks up the carcasses and other things to make stuff that goes into pet food. Honest.”

I was deeply affected by this information. During the drive back to Baltimore I couldn’t stop talking about the horrid, poetic perversion of it all. “It’s soylent green for pets,” I exclaimed. Remorsefully I recalled that as a kid I was known to eat dry dog food–strictly on an experimental basis, of course. If I had known I might have been eating refried Rover, I’d have tamed my curiosity.

Over the ensuing months I started to gather what little documentation I could find about rendering. I learned it is a necessary and little-known industry that cooks and processes huge quantities of waste fats and proteins–mostly animal tissues and used restaurant grease. From the fat, renderers make yellow grease and tallow; from the protein comes meat-and-bone meal, which is used primarily in dry animal feed.

I visited Earl Watson, then the director of the Baltimore City Animal Shelter, and discovered that the city pays Valley Proteins, a rendering company with a plant in Curtis Bay, to cart off its euthanized pets and road kill. Then I spoke with Valley Proteins plant manager Neil Gagnon in the first of several conversations about rendering that eventually led to an August 1995 guided tour of the plant with City Paper photographer Michelle Gienow. She and I also spent a day following Valley Proteins truck driver Milt McCroy from the animal shelter to Parks Sausage to Ruppersberger Meats on Pennsylvania Avenue.

These experiences became the backbone of a September 1995 City Paper cover story titled, “Meltdown: What Happens to Dead Animals at Baltimore’s Only Rendering Plant.” Among other things, the story established that dead pets and road kill are part of the raw-materials mix at Valley Proteins’ Curtis Bay plant for meat-and-bone meal, some of which is sold to pet-food manufacturers.

I’ve had little peace on the rendering front since.

First, there were the horrified readers. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wrote in, concerned that sodium pentobarbital–the poison used to euthanize unwanted pets at the animal shelter–is getting into pet food. A fan of Gienow’s work was upset that the paper ran her photos of barrels full of dead pets waiting to be rendered. A critic even argued that I shouldn’t have written about pets going into pet food because Valley Proteins President J.J. Smith, interviewed for the article, said he doesn’t like to talk about it. One woman called me in tears, fearful that her dead pooch had ended up in dog food.

The initial aftermath was followed by a steady flow of interest from faraway places. Canadian journalists started contacting me after Anne Martin, a pet-food activist from Nova Scotia, used an excerpt of my article in her book Food Pets Die For. Local television news shows in Texas, Connecticut, and Kansas used the CP piece and Gienow’s photos to do their own stories. 20/20, the ABC newsmagazine, chewed up hours of my time trying to arrange a lengthy exposé of the pets-in-pet-food phenomenon, then quietly abandoned the effort.

Amid all of this, in March 1996, another wrinkle was added to what I knew about the rendering biz. The British government announced 10 people had died from new-variant Cruetzfeld-Jacobs disease (nvCJD), a human form of mad-cow disease. I soon learned that I had missed a very important point about rendering in “Meltdown”: infected meat-and-bone meal caused the spread of mad-cow disease in Great Britain. And now the disease appeared to be crossing the species line into humans. Suddenly rendering seemed to be an inadvertently insidious industry tied to a mysterious medical threat, not a sensible and profitable recycling measure, as I had previously reported. (In July of last year I made up for this oversight with another article, “Bad Brains: Maryland’s Role in the Mystery of Cannibal Brains, Mad Cows, and an Emerging Food Scare.”)

Enter Oprah. On the April 16, 1996, broadcast of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Humane Society’s Howard Lyman, a former rancher turned food-safety advocate, declared that U.S. rendering practices are just like Britain’s, so one mad cow unwittingly rendered into feed for other cattle could cause an outbreak here just as it did there. Voluntary precautions the U.S. rendering industry had taken to prevent an outbreak in this country weren’t working, he said. And he pointed out that pets and road kill enter the cattle-feed mix. Winfrey swore off hamburgers after Lyman said a U.S. mad-cow epidemic would “make AIDS look like the common cold.”

Texas cattlemen were outraged. Four of them, led by Paul Engler of Cactus Feeders, sued under an untested law, the Texas False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act of 1995, that makes it easier for perishable-food producers to win libel suits over statements that criticize their products. (During the trial the judge dismissed that basis for the suit, leaving Engler to pursue the suit as a case of common-law business disparagement, which is very hard to prove.) Labeling Lyman’s statements “exaggerations, untruths, and innuendo,” Engler claimed to have lost $6.7 million as a result of lagging sales after Winfrey’s show aired.

Late last winter, I got a call from Leslie Ashby, one of Oprah’s lawyers. She said she had a copy of “Meltdown,” which seemed to corroborate some of Lyman’s statements about rendering. She flew up to Baltimore to meet with me and Michelle Gienow and obtain the negatives of Michelle’s numerous, gory photographs. She asked us if we would be willing to testify about what we saw of the rendering industry. “Sure,” we said.

Having been unsuccessfully sued for defamation myself, I felt it was important for my information and Michelle’s photos to be available to a jury–especially since the case involved a law that places new restrictions on speech. Besides, based on what I knew about rendering, Lyman’s statements appeared substantially accurate, if scant in some important details.

So I flew down to Amarillo to testify on Feb. 18 as the opening witness in Oprah Winfrey’s defense. Michelle unfortunately couldn’t make it, but her photographs were the main exhibit–about 50 of them, displayed one at a time on a big screen with my play-by-play commentary corroborating statements Lyman made on the show.

Cross-examining me, the cattlemen’s lawyers asked questions about Dykes to Watch Out For, a comic City Paper runs, perhaps believing the jury would think poorly of a journalist who works for a newspaper that carries a lesbian comic strip. Then they trotted out a copy of a satirical, self-deprecating sketch I wrote about myself that is tucked away somewhere on CP‘s Web site (“no respectable, buttoned-down company” would hire me “to do anything of significance,” it says). The jury thought it was funny.

But never did the attorneys try to discredit “Meltdown” or “Bad Brains.” In fact, Engler came up to me after my testimony, shook my hand, and said he thought I did a fine job on the stand and that my articles were topnotch. This from a guy whose lawsuit I’d just punched several holes in (and who went on to lose; the jury returned a verdict in Winfrey’s favor on Feb. 26).

Never say they aren’t good sports down in Texas.