Join us for our annual Fall Lecture and Doors Open Baltimore’s kickoff lecture with Nicole King, Ph.D! 

After an 18-year fight to save her home from condemnation by Baltimore City, Sonia Eaddy won. The historic Sarah Ann Street alley houses will be preserved and offered for homeownership after being rehabbed by Shelley Halstead of Black Women Build. However, the story of redevelopment in Poppleton illustrates how Baltimore City failed to see and hear the people of this historically Black neighborhood along the Highway to Nowhere. Working with residents on research, public programming, and organizing to amplify the stories of legacy residents fighting for development without displacement, we were able to achieve a reset on a misguided redevelopment project underway since 2004. The City’s stance is that we cannot change the past and must move forward in good faith. As a cultural historian and preservationist, I argue we must honor and remember the past and how we got here in order to do the hard work to repair and make amends for the damage done to Black neighborhoods and people in Baltimore. We need real change on how development works in Baltimore and cities like it.

About the Speaker

Nicole King, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies and director of the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture at UMBC. Her research focuses on issues of place, power, and economic development. She co-founded the Baltimore Traces: Communities in Transition public humanities project where students work with local partners to research historic neighborhoods and complete cultural documentation projects. She is an editor of the book Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City (Rutgers University Press, 2019).