Last year, I travelled to and spent two months in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. I was hosted in the graduate facilities of Morgan State University.

Looking back a year ago, I was wryly told by a few Americans that Baltimore was a “real American city”, that it was “gritty” and of course that The Wire had been filmed in Baltimore.

The Wire has long since left the streets of Baltimore, but the lived experience of that fictional story still lingers. The ‘police station’ from The Wire sits isolated in the harbour area and the only thing that remembers its existence is a plaque.

Baltimore and Morgan State still carry the historical scars of a place that has not allowed all of its citizens to actively embrace the aspiration of the ‘dream’. The dream of a better tomorrow is still out of reach for many Baltimoreans.

Morgan State is made ‘less’ as it is in the same city as the world-famous Johns Hopkins University, which in turn is like an octopus in Baltimore, snapping up land and contributing to the ever-loathsome concept of gentrification. Gentrification is, of course, not the worst of Baltimore’s problems.

The past few weeks have highlighted how the intersection between race, class and the status quo often play out in very violent ways.

A year ago I had to navigate the streets of Baltimore and the most moving part of that experience was to spend time in West Baltimore at a youth educational facility. The day spent with the young Baltimoreans, most of them already having been sentenced for crimes, highlighted just how stark their lived reality was, and how they were still judged on their race, class and where they came from.

Baltimore is the tale of many other cities across America such as Detroit and is a reminder about the protests in the 1980s and 1990s.

This is the story about people who feel forgotten. It is the story about how the system often fails its most vulnerable. It is also the story about leaders who are often out of touch with reality and what people are experiencing on the ground.

Today, Baltimore has around 622,000 people, 63 percent of whom are black. The mayor, the police chief, the city council president and City’s state’s attorney are all black. Around 48 percent of the police force is also black. However, all of that did not stop the unlawful arrest of Freddie Gray or the fact that the police on 19 April crumpled him like “origami”.

As a Baltimorean (or a visitor) all you need to do is look around and you will see the heaviness that hangs in the air and how the unemployment rate is often linked directly to the colour of your skin and where you live.

There is a visible anger in Baltimore that is palpable from the streets of Canyon Springs to Pennsylvania and North avenues to the row houses in Dolphin Street. It is an anger that is noticeably washed away and ignored in the Inner Harbour or the plush suburbs but it is an anger that permeates the entire city.

If you are walking around the plush neighbourhoods with little sidewalk bistros, or in the areas frequented by tourists then it may not immediately be apparent that the anger is bubbling under the surface.

The anger is not simply about race but it is becoming more and more about age as well.

Taking the Number 3 Metro bus in the evening from the Inner Harbour will have you share the bus with the hard-working middle and working class Americans, most of them middle-aged, who have worked a full day, and are now heading home to see their loved ones but it will also have young Baltimoreans along for the drive with no real purpose.

Last year in June, I got on the Number 3 Bus and witnessed the struggle of the middle-aged Americans to bring the younger Americans into check. Pleas of “bus driver, take control of your bus” went unanswered and didn’t stop the young Americans, some aged as young as 12, spewing forth profanities, screaming and generally making the bus drive one of the most disturbing I have ever encountered.

There was a palpable fear on that bus, and it was felt by all of us including my companion Ida from The Gambia. When we eventually spilled out of the bus onto the pavement of Canyon Springs Lane, we were thankful and relieved.

We may have been visitors in Baltimore, but we had shared in the journey Baltimoreans have to take on a daily basis. It was a journey full of fear and anxiety and hopelessness but it is their lived reality. It is a reality that has largely gone unanswered for many years.

That bus drive reminded me about using the public transport system in Cape Town or elsewhere in South Africa. The more affluent areas are serviced by a highly resourced and efficient system, matched with security and an obsession with ‘cleanliness’, whilst the route through less affluent areas will be navigated with degradation, safety concerns, overcrowding, uncertainty and fear.

There are underlying complexities in Baltimore in particular that having the numbers rarely mean that ‘change’ or ‘transformation’ has arrived. The status quo must be confronted and we must reclaim our space.

The complexities of Baltimore have in large parts been out of reach of the main media outlets, who only descend, as to be expected, when the communities started burning.

I had the privilege of meeting citizens in Baltimore, who had embraced a sense of community activism and change. They had mobilised their efforts to make the schooling system work, to organise for safer communities, to cleaning the streets and to shutting down drug houses, and to cleaning up abandoned row houses in their communities.

One of these opportunities was a barbecue dinner in Brookfield Avenue, Baltimore where we spent an evening with Marilyn Mosby, then Democratic nominee for the Baltimore State Attorney position, and Nick Mosby, her husband, councillor in the Baltimore City Council.

That night we spoke about the challenges that Baltimoreans faced on a daily basis, which have sadly been so violently exposed these past few weeks, and about how many people in Baltimore were trying to change that lived reality.

The news outlets will have the shots of drug stores on fire on the corner of Pennsylvania and North avenues, West Baltimore but it often won’t tell the story about how young kids spend their days in the Enoch Pratt Free Library on the very same intersection.

We have just this past week seen Marilyn Mosby, a first-term State Attorney, acting swiftly to charge those six police officers who were responsible for the death of the 25-year-old Freddie Gray.

There is a power of dreaming about a world beyond the modest row houses. It is a dream, which transcends the ugliness of the real world, and it is only possible if that dream is nurtured and encouraged.

Baltimore is now provided with an opportunity to confront the truth.

The work ahead for Baltimore and its leaders is not an easy one but there is a dream beyond the row houses and the burning CVS pharmacy.

The challenge is that dream needs to be acted upon immediately, as there is no time left for empty words. DM