Two weeks after I moved to Maryland, I was in a seminar at a tower building at the end of Baltimore Ave. Maybe the tenth floor.
During a break, I was standing next to an older black gentleman. We didn’t know each other nor had we ever spoken a word to each other.
He looked down and said “I won’t even go down that street.”
When I lived in Maryland, I worked with a black guy who grew up in Columbia and Towson. I told him about a wrong turn I took in DC, when leaving the Smithsonian area. I turned onto US 1, instead of 50.
US 1 from the Mall leads through some of the worst slums of DC. He said that he would be afraid to drive through the area.