So Cambridge burns, again.
Forty years and nearly six months after someone torched Pine Street Elementary School and set off a blaze that burned down nearly all of Cambridge's black business district, a fire this week destroyed two businesses housed in historic structures on Race Street and derailed efforts at an economic revival of the Eastern Shore city's downtown district.
That's a setback, not a defeat.
"We're trying to regroup," said Penny Tilghman, the associate director of Cambridge's Department of Economic Development. "The city government is trying to get funds for the businesses to relocate."
Cambridge Mayor Cleveland Rippons said the state and federal government have "come to the table" with offers to help.
"The governor called the night of the fire," Rippons said. "His secretary called the next day. Senators [Barbara] Mikulski and [Benjamin] Cardin also called."
News of the fire hit me like a Joe Frazier left hook to the solar plexus. I've been spending quite a bit of time recently in Cambridge. On three weekends in October and November, I was in the city doing interviews for a joint project sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University and the University of Pennsylvania's Africana studies department.
The study sent reporters to seven American cities that had riots in the 1960s to discern if any of them had implemented the recommendations of the Kerner Commission Report, issued on Feb. 29, 1968. Out of Newark, N.J., Detroit, Philadelphia, Tampa, Fla., Birmingham, Ala., Los Angeles and Cambridge, I was selected to write about Cambridge.
And I was darned glad I was selected. It was a homecoming for me, of sorts.
Many years ago I spent several summers in Cambridge, at the home of my uncle, Theodore Kane, and his wife, Mae. My siblings and I looked forward to the visits. "Going down to the country," we called it.
My work on the joint project - called "Kerner Plus 40" - allowed me to go into detail about Cambridge's history. I wrote about the two riots the city had in 1963 that erupted after violence broke out between blacks and whites following demonstrations against segregated public accommodations. Then there was that nasty business back in 1967.
