| Abstract: | The University of Baltimore offered a community-based course following the Baltimore unrest in 2015. The course, which we called Divided Baltimore, engaged scores of students and community members together in a weekly forum of presentations and hard discussion. It focused on how Baltimore became segregated, how segregation affects all Baltimoreans, and what we could do about it. I discuss how the course worked, what we learned, and how we were able to pull off the course in short order. The key to what we accomplished was having built community partnerships around structural racism and racial equity in Baltimore over a period of several years before 2015. The lesson is that we can all do this—all be intellectuals in the public—if first we invest the time, our talents, and our intellectual energy in community engagement. |
