Here Comes The White-Power Safety Patrol
They Want To Clean Up Your Campus
By Wes Enzinna (Vice.com, 5/29/2013)
Matthew Heimbach insists he’s not a racist. This comes as a surprise to his fellow students at Towson University, in the suburbs of Baltimore, where Matthew has formed a group called the White Student Union that advocates for “persons of European heritage”—what most of us call “white people.” It also comes as a surprise to the African American students who feel targeted by the night patrols the senior history major began conducting in March. The patrols target supposed “black predators,” Matthew wrote on the WSU’s website, citing (among others) a case in which an African American man pulled out a knife and his penis, and wagged both at a co-ed couple who were copulating in a parking garage. “White Southern men,” he wrote, “have long been called to defend their communities when law enforcement and the State seem unwilling to protect our people.”
Also surprised by Matthew’s claim that he’s not a racist is Duane Davis. “You are a fat, racist little bitch,” the scrappy, dreadlocked man told Matthew one sunny Tuesday this April. There was a rally going on, organized by the Student Government Association and the Black Student Union. In a field behind Duane and Matthew, about 100 students protested the White Student Union by reading unity-themed slam poetry from a microphone. When Matthew showed up on the edge of the crowd, a dozen protesters had come to confront him. Down the façade of a parking garage, a banner unfurled reading, WSU GTFO (translation: White Student Union Get the Fuck Out).
“There’s no need to insult me,” Matthew told Duane, who looked one wrong reply away from punching the 21-year-old.
Matthew has the look of someone who’s been bullied his whole life: he puffs out his chest to hide an abundant belly, wears unfashionable drugstore spectacles, and on this day sported what vaguely resembled a Morrissey T-shirt.
Continue reading “Here Comes The White-Power Safety Patrol” at Vice.com.
Alice Cooper rocks 2,000 in Towson Some skip school to hear ’70s rocker deliver his new anti-drug message.
By Meredith Schlow (Baltimore Evening Sun, 9/10/1991)
Rocker Alice Cooper played to about 2,000 in Towson’s Courthouse Plaza today, turning the normally sedate lunchtime crowd into a rocking group that mixed teens in black attire with the regular professionals in suits and ties.
1. Under My Wheels
2. I’m Eighteen
3. Hey Stoopid
4. Love’s A Loaded Gun
5. School’s Out
6. No More Mr. Nice Guy
There is even a bootleg DVD of the concert!
Fans, new and old, crowded in front of the courthouse to hear Cooper, one of rock’s legendary bad boys of the ’70s, who is touring the country promoting his new album, “Hey Stoopid.” Its title cut carries a strong anti-drug message.
Teen-agers crowded on the grass, but declined to give their names as they admitted they had cut school to hear Cooper sing.
“I’ve heard [Cooper’s] done some gross things, like bite the heads off bats,” one high school senior in the crowd said.
“I thought there might be some big truancy roundup,” said another teen, eyeing the police officers who stood at the perimeter of the plaza. “They’d lure us all down here, and then say, ‘OK, up against the wall!’ ”
Continue reading “Alice Cooper rocks 2,000 in Towson” at The Baltimore Sun.
Local hero dreams of being back in Baltimore with hard-shelled crabs and beer.
Today marks the 145th anniversary of Memorial Day, a day to honor those men and women, both nationally and right here in our own background, who gave their lives in the service of their country.
As a port city and former steel manufacturing hub, Baltimore has always been active during military conflicts, especially during The Big One. Baltimore was right in the thick of the Allied war effort in World War II – launching the first Liberty ship (the SS Patrick Henry, which was constructed at the Bethlehem-Fairfield yard), producing military aircraft like the B-26 Marauder at the Glenn L. Martin plant in Middle River, and training grunts and sailors alike for combat duty at facilities like Camp Holabird, Fort McHenry, Curtis Bay and elsewhere.
Baltimore was certainly “on the map” during the second world war, and Hollywood took notice, name-checking B-more for its stereotypical “Charm City” attributes in a number of films. Long before this town become synonymous with violent crime, drug peddling and urban decay in TV series like Homicide, The Wire and The Corner (not to mention prostitution – don’t forget, Tippy Hedren’s mom in Hitchcock’s Marnie was a sailor-baiting floozy), a Baltimore reference usually involved beer (our German brewing heritage long celebrated by H.L. Mencken) and crabs (both the edible kind and, later, the sexually-transmitted variety) – though in Fred Zinnemann’s post-war film The Search (1948), Montgomery Clift boasted that he was from “Baltimore, the cleanest, finest city in the United States!”
Faux native son Montgomery Clift gilds the lily of Charm City in “The Search.”
But more often than not, vets from Mobtown were vetted as legit homies by referring to our beer and seafood. One of my favorites name-checks was by native son “Pvt. Jim Layton” (played by Marshall Thompson) in William Wellman’s WWII classic Battleground(1949), in which the soldier holes up under wreckage dreaming about being “back home in Baltimore, loadin’ up on hard-shelled crabs and beer.”
His pal Holley (Van Johnson) counters, “That dream’s against regulations, soldier. You know what our boys overseas always dreams about.”
Pvt. Jim Layton: “Mom’s blueberry pie?”
Holley: “Why certainly. That’s what they’re fighting for. Boy, when I get home, just give me a hot dog and a slice of that pie. Am I gonna kick when I don’t get my job back? No siree.”
I’ve excerpted that “Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time” clip below as a fitting Memorial Day tribute to our vets and their service fighting for the Baltimore – if not the American – culinary “way of life.” Pie schmie! Crabs and beers on the homefront – it’s what got this town’s Band of Brothers through WWII!
