The Collapse of the Key Bridge
In Time, Baltimoreans Will Be Asked, "What's in a Name?"
When news broke of the tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the Hard Histories Lab was in the midst of a workshop week, in discussions between Paris and Berlin with colleagues confronting the difficult past of the U.S., the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. Details first came to us via social media, but over the next days stories appeared in our local papers, including Paris’s Le Monde - “State of Emergency Declared After Baltimore Bridge Collapses” - and Berlin’s Der Spiegel - “Brücke in Baltimore Bricht Nach Kollision mit Schiff Zusammen.” This blow to Baltimore’s infrastructure, economy, and everyday life-blood was world news.
Throughout our workshop proceedings, participants invoked our city’s newest challenge and repeated our #BaltimoreStrong motto, echoing sentiments that rang from many corners, including from the leadership at Johns Hopkins. At Hard Histories, we have remained fixed on the fates of the workers lost during the collapse and the well-being of their families and communities.
There is, our followers won’t be surprised, a hard histories dimension to this story, one that will unfold over the years-long rebuilding of a new, replacement span, the duration of which university experts still cannot estimate. What, some commentators are already asking, will we call the new bridge? Is it time to retire the name of Francis Scott Key? Columnist Jamie Stiehm, just this week in a piece titled “A Key to Baltimore's Broken Heart,” concluded that retiring Key and selected a new name for the bridge is in order: “An avowed racist must be "gone" from bridge-building in the 21st century.”
We’ve written a bit, for the Philadelphia Inquirer, about the life and the interests of Frances Scott Key, best remembered today as an enslaver, composer of the “Star Spangled Banner,” and brother-in-law to U.S. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, the notorious author of the Dred Scott decision, in the essay “Scars and Stripes.” And controversy over retaining Key’s name long-predates last week’s bridge collapse. As far back as 2020, a Washington, D.C. mayoral committee recommended removing Key’s name from the city-owned Key Bridge Boathouse. More recently, in 2023, calls to remove Key’s name from school buildings, in Montgomery County and at the University of Maryland, surfaced.
These earlier calls to remove Key’s name from existing infrastructure are distinct from what may follow the unplanned and still devastating demise of the Key Bridge. In years to come, public officials along with the communities that surround the new span will face the challenge of naming what may be regarded as a feat of engineering and a blank slate: a new span across the lower Patapsco River and outer Baltimore Harbor. Here, recently developed guidelines for twenty-first century naming, such as those devised by Johns Hopkins University’s “Name Review Board,” set forth useful principles in a preliminary report: “Naming and de-naming allow the institutions to express preference in their symbolic associations, to rectify or contextualize past wrongdoing, and to emphasize the best modern examples of fairness and justice.”
Today, our first concerns remain with ensuring the dignity to those lost in the Key Bridge collapse and with maintaining the livelihood of workers affected by the related disruptions in water and automobile transportation. We also hope that over time the principles and insights that grow out of our Hard Histories work will aid in writing a new chapter in our city’s history, one in which who we honor and how we honor them will take center stage.
— MSJ
UPCOMING WEBINAR: MONDAY APRIL 15, 2024, 12 NOON EASTERN.
Our guests are two Johns Hopkins alums who have remained committed to a Hard Histories vision of the University. Dr. Paige Glotzer, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dr. Jennie K. Williams, Kinfolkology and the University of Virginia, will share how they have continued to ask challenging question to their alma mater about its historical ties to slavery and anti-Black racism. Register here.