Even from an early age, my parents imbued in us the knowledge that although life wasn’t just, we could always do something about it. We lived, the soon-to-be five of us, in a big house in the middle of a broken-down neighborhood in West Baltimore, lassoed by red-lining and crippled by the drug trade. My parents’ pleas to elected officials and city agencies, about everything from broken streetlights to increased police presence near open-air drug markets, were constant. Sometimes they got a response, sometimes they didn’t. But they were relentless because they were trying to create the world
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