Shawna Murray-Browne / Photo: Joshua Slowe

During the final week of April 2015, Shawna Murray-Browne and a couple friends decided to hit the intersection of Pennsylvania and North Avenue (locally known as Penn-North) on the city’s westside to make their presence felt. What brought them and thousands of others — from near and far — to the streets of West Baltimore was the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore City Police nearly three weeks prior. On April 12th of 2015, Gray was arrested by officers for possessing a knife. According to witnesses at the scene who filmed the incident around Gray’s Gilmor Homes, officers used excessive force, including knees to the back of his neck and bending his legs backwards to get him into the police van. Unable to move due to this handling, Gray arrived at the University of Maryland shock trauma center in Downtown Baltimore in a coma. During the week following his arrival, Gray had three broken vertebrae, including his spine being 80% severed at his neck. On April 19th, Gray died while still in a coma, a week after his arrest.

At the time of his death, Murray-Browne, an integrative psychotherapist, was working in Baltimore City public schools as a community coordinator and had become especially focused on what was happening in the wake of Gray’s passing. Her practice at the time was primarily centered around equipping Black children and their parents with the tools to process what was happening throughout the city in a way that resonated with them culturally.

“On the one hand it was really beautiful because you saw an outpouring of folks who are not from the city of Baltimore, ain’t never been here, and might not ever come, actually show some interest in solidarity,” Murray-Browne said during a stroll through Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park on a sunny, yet windy March afternoon. “But the downside of the white gaze and the way that media was portraying that experience meant that only certain stories were amplified. And the people who have been doing movement work were framed in a way that was commodified. Framed in a way that was clickbait and not really telling the depth of the work.”

She found herself directly affected by being seen through that gaze in the aftermath of her trek to Penn-North that day. Dressed in all white with a headwrap to match, Shawna and company came with healing properties such as crystals and sage to cleanse the space. A photo of her — sitting on the ground with her legs crossed, eyes closed, and sage in hand while people embrace each other in the background — was captured and spread like wildfire on Facebook and Instagram. It has become both a highlight and a dehumanizing experience for Murray-Browne since who had hoped that her virality would have resulted in some outside interest in her healing work. It mostly just attracted people using her photo as a meme that incorporated spirituality into internet jokes. She laughingly admits that a few were comical, but many teetered on a dangerous line.

Most opportunistic was when someone from Mom’s Organic Market realized that Murray-Browne had a tote bag of theirs in the photo and reposted it to their social channels, completely ignoring the necessary context needed. “Essentially they were using my image to draw more business for them,” she assessed while sitting on a park bench.

On those same streets during April 2015’s unrest, a host of others began to experience hypervisibility due to their participation in bellowing out their frustrations in the name of Freddie Gray, along with the unanticipated residual effects that came along with it.

The footage of Kwame Rose feverishly contending with Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera’s right-wing on-the-ground reporting is one of the more recognizable moments from that time. Rose, 21 then, donned a black snapback cap turned backwards, a black zip-up hoodie and an intensity in his gaze that can be felt through the screen when you go back and watch it now. In the time since, he’s essentially become a face of that movement, both by outsider media’s hunger for content and his own motivations to be heard. He was a central character in the HBO-produced, Baltimore Rising, a documentary that followed activists, cops, and community members in the wake of the unrest. And since, he’s been the subject of protest news specials by outlets like VICE, as well as working in the Baltimore City mayor’s office under Catherine Pugh, the city’s mayor from 2016-2019.

“When Freddie Gray died that was the first time I ever participated in protest,” Rose recalled sitting on a stool on the rooftop of his Downtown Baltimore apartment building. “I never imagined that me being out at a protest, that my life would be like this. But I guess it’s life.”

The video of Rose letting off steam to Geraldo amassed millions of views across social media in a span of 24 hours and it catapulted him to a life that he wasn’t remotely prepared for. Before that, the spirit of community mindedness was in his work, but it was in its embryonic stages.

When he returned home from college in Texas a couple years before the unrest, Rose and a few friends started a nonprofit organization called Brothers In Action that worked out of West Baltimore’s Booker T. Washington middle school, providing life skill training and field trips with young men who weren’t performing well academically. But after witnessing the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown (both around the same age as him), Rose felt the urge to involve himself on the ground when fatal policing was shaking his hometown. And like many, the decision to do so led to quick viral fame with little-to-no preparation for the aftermath — both negative and positive — that would follow it.

On the other side of the camera during this time, instead of being the subject of moments being captured, photographer Devin Allen was doing the shooting himself. But, in a number of ways, he was poised for the contributions he’s made to giving the world an intimate look at Black Baltimore’s struggle for liberation.

In the early part of the 2010’s Allen began to ingratiate himself with Baltimore’s creative community by trying his hand at taking photos. It was a hobby — a way for him to develop a new skill as the pressures of being a young father were starting to intensify. He’d shoot young artists in the city who needed photos more regularly as social media’s role in marketing began to ramp up. Around this same time, a high school friend of his named Sean Gamble was killed in a shooting that involved an off-duty cop outside of Baltimore’s Select Lounge in January of 2011. The off-duty cop, William Torbit Jr., was also killed when police officers arrived to a heated altercation outside the club, unaware that he was an officer as well.

“When he got killed, everybody was protesting and at the time, in my headspace, I was like, ‘Protesting don’t get you nowhere, man. This is life. It is what it is,’” Allen says while sitting in the kitchen of his Baltimore home. “So in 2014 when Mike Brown died, me and some others went to the local protest. Just seeing all the people congregating like that, it was so indescribable because that was my first time. After that, from already being inspired by Gordon Parks, I always tried to make my work meaningful.”

A year later, fueled by the memory of his friend Sean and the uptick in police brutality against Black people across the U.S., Allen hit the front lines of Baltimore’s unrest in response to Freddie Gray’s death. A photo he captured downtown, with a man running towards a cop car with his face covered, has been synonymous with The Uprising since, landing him a cover on TIME magazine, a full-time job shooting campaigns for Under Armour, and a fellowship at The Gordon Parks Foundation.

“I think a lot of people already had their purpose but that made people more eager and stronger,” he remembers of 2015’s Uprising. “It’s sad but I feel like it might have been the best thing to happen to Baltimore because he gave a lot of people a voice. He made a lot of us more powerful. And it put a lot of the issues that we get blamed for, it got put on the politics in Baltimore. If the Freddie Gray situation never happened you would have never seen a lot of stuff that was happening here get aired out. Even Barack Obama was calling our kids thugs.”

Virality (the tendency of an image, video, or piece of information to be circulated rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another) is at the root of popular culture in today’s society. More often than not, it’s used as a tool and proof that whatever you create (even your online persona itself) has the cache to attract a mass audience. And if you can prove that you’re able to do this with any amount of regularity, then you can leverage that influence to make money or to get to the next step of your career. This is especially true in the creative fields of the past five-to-six years.

More than ever before, the music industry is signing artists like Bhad Baby, Lil Nas X, and countless TikTok stars to record deals because their popularity stands the chance of being a great tool to sell music and ad space. In 2015, a woman named Zola went on a 148-tweet long thread about a crazy road trip from Detroit to Florida for a quick cash come up at a strip club. The thread made so much traction that film studio A24 (Moonlight, Uncut Gems, Midsommar) is adapting it into a film that’ll be out later this year.

But in the case of going viral for your involvement in a movement that wouldn’t have existed if a 25-year-old Black man wasn’t killed by police, complications are all but guaranteed because activism isn’t perceived as something that should ever be self-serving. Murray-Browne, Rose and Allen all spoke on the lasting effects that virality had on them both during and after The Uprising:

Shawna Murray-Browne:

Folks don’t have any appreciation for the beauty of Black folk. They just saw a Black woman in white garb and used the image and also conflated multiple Black women as one being, so it led to a dehumanization process. And so the way that it informed my work later is a couple of things: one, I ended up actually establishing Healing Bmore Activists as an intentional initiative that would do more than just sporadically hold healing space for change makers in the city but would actually talk about things that were seldom discussed around racial battle fatigue, superwoman schema, John Henryism and really put it in a context where folks can remember how to heal themselves. And think about how to incorporate those healing technologies in the movement work that they’re doing.

Kwame Rose:

The day before the Geraldo video I had like 43 followers on Twitter. I don’t think I ever sent a tweet. It automatically jumped to thousands of people knowing who I am and being on every major news channel. I had no choice. And still figuring out how to feed myself from all of this and for a while I didn’t. I don’t regret any of it. I’ve been able to have experiences I never dreamed of.

Folks see you a certain way and what they don’t realize is that you’re still a person tryna navigate life. It’s hard. I don’t wanna talk about niggas dying everyday because that’s what my career is. I go through this thing all the time where — my whole career, no matter how successful I get is built off of people dying or trauma or pain. Even during Covid-19, yeah we’ve been able to feed all these thousands of meals and pay millions of dollars plus to restaurants but it’s all at the expense of people suffering. We’ve been able to help but why can’t I do something where I don’t gotta solve people’s pain? Because then I gotta take that home.

I have spent my entire adult life in the public eye. Since three weeks before my 21st birthday, I’ve been on TV, on camera, folks have known me. And in a way, for me, I feel like I’m judged and criticized a lot more for my mistakes because I’m supposed to be this perfect hero. And I’ve learned over the years I don’t care about nobody’s opinion of what it is I should or shouldn’t be doing.

Devin Allen:

It’s a burden that I gotta bear. My career is built on the broken back of Freddie Gray. Period. Everything I have, all my success is always gonna be tied back to that, regardless. Even if you look at George Floyd I’ma be tied to that too because I had the TIME cover that represented their story. I understand having a larger purpose in life and God put you in positions for those moments but it is a heavy burden. Like, a lot of people don’t know I was suicidal. Growing up in the hood, I’ve seen people get shot. It’s a part of the culture here and a lot of Black communities. And I’m so used to it, but that’s different. To be getting tear gassed and pepper sprayed, dealing with PTSD. And around that time it was so much going on and I ain’t have nobody to talk to. Everybody’s championing me. I’m meeting everybody. John Singleton comes to Baltimore and does a talk over at Douglass, I go take a picture and bring him a magazine. Carmelo [Anthony] in town, let’s go eat crabs with Melo.

But when I go lay down at night it’s like yo, this shit’s crazy. I’m stressed out. I’m tryna run around everywhere, I’m not sleeping, I’m not eating. I’m working at night, go take pictures, everybody wants me here and there. And then people still need me on the front lines. It just got to a point where I just broke.

In the years since Freddie Gray’s death, Baltimore has been forced — on a institutional level — to reckon with much of what has been wrong with the city for decades. A year-long investigation of the Baltimore Police Department by the US Department of Justice concluded that the city's officers engaged in unconstitutional practices, leading to disproportionate rates of stops, searches, and arrests of black residents. 44 percent of their stops were made in two predominantly black neighborhoods, which made up only 11 percent of the city's population. Black residents accounted for 95 percent of the 410 individuals police stopped over ten times from 2010 to 2016.

In the years following the DOJ report another police scandal surfaced with the Gun Trace Task Force, a special unit whose members all engaged in racketeering, planting drugs on citizens, and robbing others at gunpoint. The majority of those officers were all handed federal prison time between 2017-2019. In 2020, former mayor Catherine Pugh was sentenced to three years in federal prison for fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion. And in 2021, federal prosecutors began to investigate City Hall office of Council President Nick Mosby and his wife, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby for their businesses, travel and tax deductions. The need for accountability in Baltimore has been felt with intensity over the past six years, and that has reached the activist community as well. Both Kwame Rose and Devin Allen have faced criticism for their alliances to people and corporations that don’t exactly line up with what some deem ethical.

In Rose’s case, he worked in Catherine Pugh’s office as well as with Bernie Sanders during his most recent campaign trail. When asked about those decisions he said, “I will say this unapologetically until the day I die: Free fucking Catherine Pugh,” with passion. “That wasn’t just a politician to me. That woman is like my grandmother. That woman is my friend. I talk to her damn near daily from federal prison. She offered me a job to come learn how government works.”

“Joe Biden’s team reached out to me last year and asked me to do some work for them. I don’t fuck with Biden’s politics,” he continued. “There’s a price tag that comes with this. This is something I get paid for that I have expertise in. Y’all need my help for community engagement or outreach? Y’all are gonna be clients. So there is a strategic process in a way. Number one, if someone’s paying for my expertise on a situation of what they should do then yes, I am gonna approach it from a business perspective because that’s how I’ve been able to change this from just being a young broke activist who everybody loved and was on TV to actually putting myself in a position where I get paid for my thoughts. The system ain’t going nowhere and we know it’s broken but it’s about how can we affect the most tangible change.”

For Allen, the criticism that he’s faced is for working for Under Armour, who gave the photographer his own line of shoes and apparel this year in which a portion of the proceeds go to teaching photography to local youth. In 2011, the company’s CEO, Kevin Plank, contributed $100,000 to the Baltimore City Police Department’s southern district as part of an initiative to provide it with new bikes, tasers, and computers. In 2016 it was announced that Plank was investing $5.5 billion into developing the Port Covington area of South Baltimore, which would effectively lead to more racial and class disparities in the city.

“This is my thing, at the end of the day I’m a human being. I’m from West Baltimore,” Allen says to those critiques. “You coming at me for working at Under Armour but you won’t come at a lot of people in the activist community who went to Johns Hopkins. You can go there and it’s ok — and we know everything that school has done. I gotta provide for my family but what you also gotta understand is that I’m looking at it like that can give me a way to affect these kids. I can use my support from Under Armor to do good things in the community and pay it forward. I’m a photographer. I never came out here and said I’m an activist. You never hear me talk about politics. I stay in my lane. Everybody got a role. Some people are meant to organize. Some people are meant to document. You can call me a concerned citizen. Everybody has a purpose. We gotta stop policing people.”

As far as the lasting effects all of this has had Allen, Rose, and Murray-Browne, each seem to have a tight grasp on how this shaped them for the better — and to be a better resource to their communities.

“There’s social movements like the textbook version and then the social movements like the way we been shaking shit up that might not be described as a social movement,” Murray-Browne reflects as we wrap up at Druid Hill. “For me it’s a reminder of why it’s important for us to know our history and why it’s important for me to center Black history over everybody else and everything else because if we forget then we’ll take the same missteps our ancestors took in trying to change stuff. The lasting impact on me is I’ve really been trying to contend with what does it mean to be free. What is liberation? And what is my responsibility to this particular location here in Baltimore City? What is my responsibility to the African diaspora altogether? So it has really put me in a place of thinking about legacy.”

Support for this project was provided by Open Society Foundations