The ones with the guns don't realize what they destroy; they're too violent, self-centered and callous to see anything beyond the moment in front of them - and it doesn't seem to matter who's standing there in the dark.
Baltimore needed Ken Harris. He was one of those "community organizers" who got involved for the greater good while others just yawned. Back in the 1990s, he was president of his community association and led an effort to get the police to pay more attention to his neighborhood. Harris used to volunteer to speak in the city schools, with the hopes of keeping boys from ending up like so many of his childhood friends - dead or incarcerated. Who knows? The one who killed Ken Harris might have been in the audience for one of his motivational speeches way back when; he might have been a kid Harris tried to save.
"There are so many negative images of African-American males," he told the first Baltimore Sun reporter who interviewed him, in 1995. "I'm not a multimillionaire or anything, but I think of myself as a positive role model. ... I try to promote how important it is to have goals and be assertive."
Ten years later, I regarded Ken Harris as a man who might be mayor some day. He showed flashes of the kind of leadership and eloquence necessary for that ascent. Despite what the 2007 primary election results might indicate about his citywide appeal, Harris had that potential. He was young. He was progressive. He was smart. He showed up for hearings, community meetings and block parties. He cared. He was part of a new generation of 40- and 30-something professionals, raising their families here, invested in the city, impatient with mediocrity.
Harris and I had more encounters in the supermarket than in City Hall. We bumped into each other three or four times a year, and almost always, it seemed, in the frozen-food aisle. Harris was always willing to engage a topic. The two he cared about most were the two a Baltimorean has to care about most - the crime rate and the education of children. He was passionate about both.
A couple of years ago, when the state proposed taking over 11 failing-for-a-decade schools, a lot of knees jerked in City Hall. Martin O'Malley was mayor, and he was running for governor against the incumbent Republican, Bob Ehrlich. O'Malley saw the takeover attempt as a cynical election-year effort by Ehrlich and Nancy S. Grasmick, the state schools superintendent, to make him look bad. O'Malley was quick to decry the proposition, and he asked the state legislature to block the move. The Democratic leadership, of course, backed him.
