Ten years ago a shocking but sobering reality awakened the consciousness of the citizens of Baltimore and beyond. A young man from the heart of the city was presumed to have been killed while in police custody. Unlike any other injustice that African American underprivileged people had faced, this one struck a nerve that wouldn’t be passively tolerated.

And suddenly without any strategy or plan the people of Baltimore, especially young people, took to the streets to retaliate against police brutality. All of a sudden the people who for successive generations normalized violence and injustice stood up and and said enough is enough.

This became such a pivotal moment for our city and for so many of our communities that had been neglected for decades. In a city where most Black men and boys are marginalized, stigmatized and institutionalized in the penal system, nobody could have ever expected that a young man by the name of Freddie Gray from Sandtown-Winchester would be the spark for reevaluation, reconciliation and restoration of Baltimore.

His death and the way that he died caused all of us to refocus on the regressive culture, entrenched poverty and unjust policies and procedures that enabled him and so many others like him to be so inhumanely mistreated. His death became about our vulnerabilities and our value as African Americans in a city where we are the majority in population, but the minority in equity and equality.

I remember on the evening after Freddie Gray’s funeral being called by Colonel Melvin Russell asking me to bring the men from my church to meet him in the streets to help quell the violence and raw emotions. And right after his call, Dr. Harold Carter, Jr. invited me and several other prominent pastors to meet with him in his office at the New Shiloh Baptist Church to discuss what would be our response.

I lent my voice to going to help silence the noise and the emotional rage. But some in the room felt like we were anonymous to the inner city residents and would have no impact. But I knew that couldn’t be true, because I knew that everybody in Baltimore knows everybody in Baltimore, especially the Black church and clergy. Some people may never attend the church, but be rest-assured they know the church, the pastor of the church and the history of the church. Baltimore has always been what we call “a church town.”

And while there have been some disconnections and divisions of Black communities from their churches, there is still a deeper reverence and resonance with the faith-based community stakeholders of our city. So when Deborah Weiner from WBAL asked us in a subsequent press conference in the chapel of New Shiloh what we were going to do, I boldly without permission from the others said we are going in the streets. And it didn’t hurt that there were a couple hundred men and pastors in the room that were already ready to go.

We marched down Monroe Street towards North Avenue singing hymns like “We Are Soldiers In The Army.” And soon we would be confronted by an army of policemen who were skeptical of who we were, at first, but then were relieved it was clergy. They asked us to help them get through the crowd, to extinguish a fire at the other end of North Avenue, and we did.

We sang and marched while they followed us with shields and weapons. Suddenly a band of young men with the number 300 on their shirts were approaching us. We thought they were a gang, but we later learned that they were a group in Baltimore founded by Munir Bahar aiming to be a neutral force during protests and reduce gun violence and murder in the city. When they approached us I was prepared to wrestle two of them down until I heard them say, “It’s the pastors!” And they asked if they could join us.

This was quite a moment that represented the best of Baltimore, the solidarity and sincerity of Baltimore that often gets overlooked by the sensationalized headlines of senseless murders that don’t always convey the real impetus for this uncivilized behavior as socio-political injustice and economic depravity.

It’s what our church, the Southern Baptist Church through our Mary Harvin Transformation Center Community Development Corporation has been trying to mitigate against since 2006 with a mantra of restoring people and rebuilding properties in East Baltimore.

Before Freddie Gray’s death we had been working with other faith-based institutions to develop a broader master plan in East Baltimore that could maximize the development of the East Baltimore Development Initiative centered around Johns Hopkins Medical by bringing a compressive and collaborative vision and partnership to develop within our footprints of influence affordable housing, early childhood education, workforce development, health care and nutrition, green spaces and greenscapes that would change the environment, the emotions, the economy, the education and the expectations of our inner city children and communities and be a model for success generations and other urban centers in America.

And thankfully we have been successful, because of the tragic death of Freddie Gray which sparked physical, emotional and spiritual fires. Sadly, our Mary Harvin Transformation Center was at the epicenter of the uprising, having been burned down when it was 50% completed, ironically while I was leading the police and firemen to put out another fire in West Baltimore. But that fire and the fire of the uprising shed a light on our victimization and vulnerabilities, but also our voices, our visions and our vitality as a deeply spiritual and sturdy steel town community. We learned during those days that we have what it takes to change the trajectory of our city so that what happened to Freddie Gray never gets normalized and never happens again.

I learned ten years ago that we have a city with all of the resources, institutions, intellect, creativity, resilience and compassion we need to transform our communities into villages of peace, productivity and prosperity for all. So many individuals and corporations alike were determined to do something even though they had no idea what to do. And that support enabled us to not only rebuild the Mary Harvin Center with full residency a year from the day it burned down, but also sponsor the East Baltimore Revitalization plan and to break ground during this ten-year anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death on several affordable housing projects, a career and education center as well as an early childhood education center and other amenities. All to restore people as we rebuild properties in East and West Baltimore.

Freddie Gray’s death though sorrowing, shocking and sobering became a seed that started to germinate into a harvest. My prayer is that we would use this time to refocus and be relentless in nurturing our neglected children and communities to not relive the past, but reimagine the future.

Donte Hickman is the pastor of Southern Baptist Church in East Baltimore.