More than two dozen people from the Baltimore metro area convened at the Y of Central Maryland's Catonsville Family Center on Rolling Road Nov. 13 to share their memories of the riots that ripped Baltimore 40 years ago.

The violence came about as city residents reacted to the April 4, 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by looting and sometimes setting fire to city stores.

The event, sponsored by the Y, the Maryland Humanities Council and the University of Baltimore, was part of a series of community conversations on the riots following a conference on the topic hosted by the university in April for the 40th anniversary of King's death.

Among those in attendance at last week's session was Vincent Stewart, a Catonsville resident who was a 20-year-old soldier stationed at Fort Holabird in 1968.

The riots had a profound and more complicated effect on the city than people acknowledge today and their impact is still apparent in many neighborhoods, according to Stewart.

"Racial strife is the overlay of everything that happens in this country," said Stewart, who is black and works for the Department of Defense. "Everything is filtered through race relations."

Last Thursday's two-hour discussion touched on a broad range of issues, from education and the impact of desegregation on black communities to the meaning of Barack Obama's election as the country's next president.

But its focus remained the riots and their aftermath.

Stella Adams, a Forest Park resident, was 22 in 1968.

She said she remembers driving with her husband on North Avenue after picking up her son from her mother-in-law's home in the city and being stopped by National Guard soldiers who wanted to know why she was breaking the curfew that Gov. Spiro Agnew had imposed on the city.

She wasn't arrested, as thousands of people were, but she does remember being terrified, she said.

"It was surreal in a way. I had not witnessed anything like that," she said. "I wondered, 'What was the point (of the riots)?' But I know so many people were angered and hurt. It was like a dream deferred.

"I think what we lost in '68, we have not regained in the city," she said.

Art Cohen, a Mt. Washington resident, said he was a young lawyer working in the city's legal aid department at the time of the riots.

The city was trying all the cases of those arrested for curfew violations and thefts right away, and Cohen had 100 new clients within just a few days' time, he said.

He and the other legal aid lawyers worked 17-hour days while trying to process what was going on around them.

"It was a unique, and very restricted, kind of view of things, because I wasn't in the streets. I was always in court," he said.

He had to fight for postponements in many of the cases because he had no time to investigate the details of the crimes being alleged, he said.

And with most of the curfew violations he was charged with handling, his clients felt no crime had been committed.

"They felt like they were caught up in a net that was cast just to get them off the streets," he said. "Most of them were just standing on their stoops."

What made things worse was that the curfew was changed twice in one day -- from 11 p.m. to 7 p.m. to 4 p.m. -- confusing residents and making it impossible for many to get home before the curfew began.

According to Jessica Elfenbein, associate provost at the University of Baltimore and the mastermind behind the university's riots project, last week's session and others like it have been attempts to open up a period of history that changed Baltimore and its surrounding areas forever.

"The story varies depending on where you stood," said Elfenbein, who is also an historian. "So our goal was never to write the definitive history but to try to document people's stories from as many different perspectives as possible."

Prior to this project, local people's memories of the riots had been "completely untapped," she said.

Another conversation about the riots will be open to the public at 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 20, at the Catonsville Family Center. Those interested in attending can call 410-747-9622.

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