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6 thomas Carney Oral History t homas Carney, who currently works in public health and bioinformatics , was a freshman at the University of Maryland–Baltimore County and living with his family in southwest Baltimore at the time of the 1968 riots. His interview richly describes life in this white working-class neighborhood in mid-twentieth-century Baltimore and the impact of the riot and its aftermath, as well as the broader social changes of the 1960s, on the neighborhood. Carney is an especially thoughtful narrator: focusing on the riot as a moment that “changes you forever,” he carefully juxtaposes a description of his experiences coming of age in the 1960s with his mature assessment of those experiences. Shannon Chorba, a student at the University of Baltimore at the time of the interview, and Alison Carney, also a UB student and Carney ’s wife, interviewed him on October 28 and December 5, 2006. i grew up in a row home in the middle of the 600 block of scott street, with my sister, my father, and my mother, in an area that is known colloquially as pigtown. it was an area of the community with a lot of factories. my father, my uncles all worked in factories. the people who lived there lived there to be close to work. it was a racially divided area, not integrated, as we describe integration. there were certain streets where blacks lived, and there were certain streets where whites lived. the [white] area was divided by Catholics, non-Catholics, Germans, italians, and irish. the different areas were Thomas Carney / 87 all self-contained; the stores you would shop in met the criteria of your ethnic background. every little neighborhood had a saloon on the corner of some main street; and inside that saloon members of the same religion and same ethnic background communed every evening. All day on Fridays and saturdays, when the paychecks came in. i lived in the irish sector of pigtown, bounded on the west by route 1, which was Washington Boulevard. route 1 was a major access route in and out of the city prior to the building of interstate 95. On the west side it was bounded by another large street, monroe street. Our backs were against the harbor, which is now the center of downtown Baltimore. As with most families, ours was very close. my mother was one of ten children; my father was one of three children. my aunt, who was my father’s sister, lived five minutes away, three streets away. my mother’s youngest sister lived at the end of the same street that we lived on, probably four blocks away. Another sister lived two streets away at the other end of the same street. We saw each other almost daily. We all went to the same church. many of my other aunts and uncles had moved from the area, but they moved to other areas of the city close to where those that they had chosen to marry had lived. they still worked inside of our community, still worked inside the same factory where they had worked as teenagers and young adults, so they had never really left the area. my cousins and aunts and uncles were always coming through our house; in fact, we lived in the house that was my grandfather’s and grandmother’s, so it became the meeting place, the stopping place on a daily basis for all the extended family. everyone went to separate schools. there was a Catholic school for each neighborhood. the German community had their Catholic school if they were Catholic and their public school if they were non-Catholic. there were no blacks in the Catholic schools.1 On many occasions, being a white child, a white teenager, i saw members of the African American community but never interacted with them. they lived on streets that we bypassed; and we bypassed by direction. their fathers and mothers were those who did the cleaning chores, the sweeping, the trash removal in the factories. they also worked in some of the stores in the neighborhood doing some of the same activities. in fact, there was a grocer that my mother frequented, that my cousin worked for, called Jake’s. Jake Franz, who was a butcher and a grocer, was out of the German Catholic community, and his delivery service was provided by a young black male by the name of reggie. And my interaction with reggie was letting...

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