In his book, "The Black Butterfly," former community-health professor Lawrence T. Brown cites a century of policies and budgets he says sapped resources from Baltimore’s African American neighborhoods, forcibly uprooted Black families and triggered generations of trauma.

He calls it apartheid, and contends it was planned and deliberately maintained, "Once you understand that--that it was done intentionally, that it wasn’t random, that it isn’t just some order of natural order of things-- it can be undone intentionally.”

He says undoing it will take deep changes like dismantling the Baltimore police department and ending toxic lead poisoning. You cannot make Black Lives Matter, he argues, unless Black neighborhoods do. This interview originally aired on February 15, 2021.

You can hear more from Lawrence Brown on May 4th at a virtual event sponsored by the Baltimore Teachers Union and the Towson University Office of Inclusion & Institutional Equity.

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