The careful reader of Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City (Temple University Press, softcover) will see the problems inherent in this remembrance of violence and upheaval from the first page. The book opens as Robert Bradby, a 21-year-old African-American steelworker, is “relaxing” at his girlfriend’s home. In the second paragraph, as the rioting starts, he is “concerned” for the safety of his girlfriend’s children, but finds them safe and so “stops for a beer.” By the third paragraph, Bradby has been shot at—or at least, bullets are fired near him. In response, he concocts an “improvised Molotov cocktail” and tosses it in a restaurant.

Bradby’s firebomb, we are told, was “about to go out when another man threw a bigger firebomb,” burning the joint to the ground and killing Louis Albrecht, a white man who had sought refuge inside.

The careful wording in these opening lines, conveying both neutrality of judgment and utter implausibility, carries through the book. Nowhere do we learn Bradby’s motive, in the midst of a riot, for stopping for a beer. Nowhere are the details of just how he quickly “improvised” a firebomb, or the calculations behind his decision to fling the thing into Gabriel’s Spaghetti House. The alleged guy with the “bigger firebomb” is not heard from again.

Bradby, who was convicted of murder and sent to prison for life, was not interviewed for the book.

In fact, virtually no one quoted in Baltimore ’68, which was edited by Jessica Elfenbein, Elizabeth Nix, and Thomas Hollowak, was among those actually burning and looting the city on those chaotic April days and nights in which six people died, some 1,150 fires were lit, an equal number of stores were looted, and at least $10 million in property damage was done. Instead, historians and sociologists strain mightily to fill the void, speculating about the motives and meaning of what York College historian Peter B. Levy judiciously calls “the uprising.”

This will be irritating to any who take seriously the prerelease promise of a “comprehensive study of this period of civil unrest,” or Howard Gillette Jr.’s forward, which compares post-riot America with Reconstruction, when white citizens saw post-Civil War reforms as simply repression by federally backed carpetbaggers. “As the historian David Blight has demonstrated so convincingly,” Gillette writes, “the victims of this prevailing collective memory were the freedmen themselves, whose voices were all but silenced in civil discourse. . . .”

And the lack of participant sources is too bad. Because Baltimore ‘68 has much to offer, and its authors (as part of a six-year oral history project helmed by Elfenbein, a University of Baltimore associate provost, with an expanded roster of interviews at tinyurl.com/Baltimore68), clearly tried mightily to include as many voices as possible. The book contains just a few of the oral histories, interspersed with expert historical analysis that seeks to contextualize the events and in the end weighs heavier than the eyewitness accounts while lacking their drama, immediacy, and unique insights. They do succeed in rethinking events that many see as the modern-day turning point for Baltimore City.

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