By Faras Aamir
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
The Rev. Dr. Kwame Abayomi, who served on the Baltimore City Council for nine years, spoke to about 20 people at the Pleasant Hope Baptist Church Thursday and shared insight into some of the work he had done on drug abuse, children’s advertising and police brutality as an elected official.
The first clergyperson to serve on the council, Abayomi said that when he first came to Baltimore from Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s, he primarily noticed problems with housing and drug and alcohol abuse in the area.
He said he joined the Citizen Planning and Housing Association to address and act on some of these issues.
His first project was the removal of Camel Cigarette billboards that he said included “subliminal messages and literal damage” to young children because they showed the cartoon character Joe Camel smoking cigarettes.
“Children were more familiar with Joe Camel than Mickey Mouse,” Abayomi said.
After Abayomi’s bill to remove the billboards passed, Baltimore became the first city in the United States to outlaw junior billboards. This caused alcohol and cigarette usage to plummet by 35 percent in the community, Abayomi said in his speech.
Abayomi also addressed his long and sometimes unsuccessful dealings with police brutality. He said that his efforts to create a civilian review board to handle complaints about police brutality cases was a step in the right direction but did not go far enough.
He said that it was unfair for the officers involved in the brutality to be able to select who reviews their case, adding jokingly that “Ray Charles could see that.”
Abayomi criticized different leaders of the community that he felt ignored police brutality and mistreatment for a long time.
“Martin O’Malley did absolutely nothing about what was going on in the police department,” Abayomi said, referring to the city’s former mayor and governor of Maryland.
After his service in the Baltimore City Council, Abayomi said he continued his activism by visiting different countries around the world, including Palestine.
He said he went there in 2009 for 14 days to find the truth behind what was going on between Palestine and Israel.
Abayomi said he “helped make exchanges for Palestinian prisoners from Israel” and spent time with their families to understand what was happening to them. He said he felt sympathy towards the Palestinians because it compared closely to African Americans during the Civil Rights movement in America.
He said that he told the Palestinian families he spent time with “you all are the new [n-words].”
Abayomi said that his duty as an activist is to continue talking about the ongoing racial separation and injustice that occurs around the world.
“My focus is on talking about reparations,” Abayomi said. “We must be financially repaired and land repaired.”
He said that African Americans never received reparations similar to what the Japanese and Native Americans received after their time of oppression in America.
The speech lasted for about an hour and was part of the church’s second Faith in the City gathering.
1 Comment
Had no idea of the specifics of his work while on the City Council for 9 years.
Amen to his insights! Where is Rev Abayomi today?