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Baltimore City, like most urban spaces, has a particular type of rhythm. It has a pulse, and it moves and breathes. It is an Upper South city that has survived despite the challenges that it faces. It is a city full of stories and storytellers. Dr. Kaye Wise Whitehead is a collector of Baltimore's stories and has shared them on her award-winning radio show, Today With Dr. Kaye, and in her former Afro column, Conversations With Dr. Kaye.
In 2017, during the Black Lives Movement, Dr. Kaye began a three-year in-depth ethnographic study within Baltimore's Black Butterfly neighborhoods, documenting and recording the stories and experiences of the community in a bi-weekly Opinion Editorial column in the Afro. Those stories were then shared in schools and communities across the city, sparking conversation and debate about who runs this city, who owns it, and who is going to inherit it.
my mother's tomorrow: dispatches through the lens of Baltimore's Black Butterfly brings together all of the editorials in one collection. In the story, "you tell them that we're not invisible, you tell them that we matter," Dr. Kaye shared the experiences of a woman who lived in a community that had gone four days without running water. She asked Dr. Kaye to tell her story so that she and the residents of the city would be "unforgetten." This book was written for her.
It was also written for the veterans that Dr. Kaye met and profiled in her "baltimore is my beirut," column who said, "You commit your life to fight for this country, then you come back home and where you live is worse than where you were fighting. It's like the war never ended."
It also for the ninth grade student who Dr. Kaye wrote about in the "i'm from baltimore, i'm already dead" column who when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up responded by saying, "My father is dead. My brother is dead. I had two cousins, they got shot. My uncles are locked up. What do I want to be when I grow up? Nothing. I'm from Baltimore, I'm already dead."
It is also for her parents who grew up in Jim Crow South Carolina and chose every day to survive and then when they raised her, taught her how to thrive.
my mother's tomorrow is a love letter to Baltimore--documenting everything from school shootings to Black Lives Matter, Trump's first presidency to Black Covid Stories--it is their words, their lives, and their experiences written and shared so that they won't be forgotten.
