About Stephon / 01 · Foundation / 02 · Home & Manhood →
Just a Kid, from Baltimore.
Baltimore · The foundation
Before I knew the name of my gift, Baltimore taught me how to read the world.
The story begins here
Charm City taught me how to make something out of what other people overlook. It gave me grit, tenacity, an underdog’s nerve, resilience and the habit of showing up when nobody expected much from me.
I entered the world on an Easter Sunday at Sinai Hospital in Park Heights, born to my 16-year-old mother, Yulawnda. My grandmother, Sheila Plato, helped raise me and protected both her daughter and the possibilities carried by her firstborn child.
Easter Sunday · A Rebellious Time
I was born on an Easter Sunday.The stories that would shape my lifehad already begun.
In the spring of 1989, the Soviet Union held a competitive national election that signaled an old order beginning to loosen. Apartheid still governed South Africa. In America, hip-hop was becoming a public language of Black resistance; within months, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” would move through Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
Here in Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke—the city’s first elected Black mayor—was asking the nation to treat addiction as a public-health crisis while crack and the War on Drugs bore down on Black communities. Inside that history, Yulawnda was becoming a mother, and Sheila was protecting her daughter and first grandchild. Black political power, failed drug policy and resistance were already shaping my family; years later, they would become part of the work I inherited as a journalist.
The disruptive millennial did not come from nowhere. I inherited the courage to question systems, listen closely and tell the stories others overlook.
Baltimore kept the receipts
The road was never straight.
The evidence was.
The proof kept accumulatingBefore I understood trajectory, Baltimore had already been collecting the proof: a safety-patrol badge, a baseball uniform and a community award honoring the strength it took to get there. Different rooms kept naming the same possibility—even when my path refused to move in a straight line.
Centered in the back row, wearing my safety-patrol lieutenant badge. Dingle Family Archive.
With my teammates at a travel tournament in Richmond, Virginia. Dingle Family Archive.
With my grandmother Sheila after receiving the Anthony Lawston Strength to Overcome Adversity Award at the annual awards and installation dinner—recognition of not only what I had survived, but how far I had already come. Dingle Family Archive.
Long before middle school, I was already chasing the story.
Beginning around eight or ten, I followed police cars and ambulances through my Greenmount Avenue neighborhood on my bike and rollerblades, then raced back to report what I had seen to my grandmother and our neighbors on the porch. At ten, near 28th Street, I saw my first dead body. They called me Mr. WJZ. Curiosity was already teaching me how to read a city.
School taught me that showing up could be its own form of faith.
At Coldstream Park Elementary, I was a safety-patrol lieutenant and earned perfect attendance even when I was sick. I also helped the lunch ladies in the cafeteria; an extra milk or a pack of cookies was my pay for being willing to help. In fifth grade, I finished second in the spelling bee—to the girl I had a crush on.
Promise did not make the path simple.
At Roland Park Elementary/Middle School, I failed sixth grade while first getting my younger brother David to Barclay Elementary School each morning, then riding the No. 64 bus—which ran only once an hour—across the city to reach my own school. I repeated my sixth-grade year at Thurgood Marshall Middle School, excelled and earned my way into eighth-grade classes by the second semester of the following year.
Thurgood Marshall was a rough school in a system that too often asked children to survive before they could learn. It taught me to be kind, help people with their work and learn the person behind the posture. Mr. Jason Mabee—our “White Jesus,” an inside joke inspired by his long hair and beard—understood that spirit. He gave us rides home, bought us pizza, coached our National Academic League team and later our baseball team, where I helped win the school’s first championship since 1973.
Continue through the archive
