Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott on Friday recalled the tragic, police-involved death of Freddie Gray nearly 10 years ago as the direct cause of unrest that ignited the city of Baltimore and resulted in significant change.

“The fuel was there,” Scott said. “That was the match.”

Dressed in a checked, light-gray blazer, blue khakis and purple-accented, low-top sneakers, Scott spoke for 90 minutes during a fireside chat today at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture as part of a two-day commemoration of Gray’s death entitled “Freddie: The Killing, the Uprising, the Reform.”

On April 12, 2015, Baltimore Police chased Gray and arrested him after finding a small knife in his pocket. The 25-year-old West Baltimore man was shackled and placed unbuckled into a police van. The medical examiner concluded that the subsequent trip inside the van was so jarring that it left Gray with a severe spinal cord injury. He died a week later, on April 19, in a case ruled a homicide.

Word of his injuries sparked increasingly tense protests, which boiled over with unrest on the day of Gray’s funeral, prompting the deployment of the National Guard and imposition of a citywide curfew.

Then-State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby swiftly charged six officers, which was celebrated as a bold, rare move to hold officers accountable by some and decried by others as a rush to judgment. Ultimately, all six officers were acquitted or had their charges dropped.

Scott said the unrest that followed Gray’s death was added to by outside instigators.

“There were folks who came in and who were not from here and tried to interject themselves,” he said.

Five years later, when cities across the country were grasping with deaths related to violent police activity involving young Black people, including George Floyd in 2020, Scott pointed out that things in Baltimore were relatively calm.

“We had lived through that,” he said. “That day, you had community individuals who were making sure these kinds of things were being done in the right way.”

In 2015, Scott recalled being a young, ambitious, 30-something City Council member who was eager to return control of the Police Department back to the city from state, and reform the approach of policing to a community-focused effort where drug use was not viewed as a crime, but as a disease.

He also talked about his push to post crime data and citizen complaints about police officers online.

Scott described Baltimore as a place “that was not going in the right direction.”

He was critical of zero-tolerance policing that targeted Black people and led to arresting 100,000 people a year. Arrests recently have fallen much lower, closer to 10,000 a year.

“Now, you can see that we have righted the ship,” he said.

“It’s not time to celebrate. It’s time to pause, and acknowledge the progress, but know that there is much more that needs to be done,” Scott said.

Scott said these efforts have been noticed on a national level.

Each week, mayors from cities across the country are coming to Baltimore to study its crime reduction strategies and other aspects of city government, Scott said.

The fireside chat with Dr. Benjamin Chavis, president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association/Black Press of America, covered a lot of ground.

Scott talked with Chavis, the former national president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, about gentrification, racism and the need to invest in equitable technology. The pair sat in front of a large acrylic painting, “Inside the Van” by Taha Heydari, which depicts Gray’s 2015 death.

Scott said he was particularly troubled by attempts to dismantle the federal Department of Education, which could cut services to Baltimore’s schoolchildren.

“When they come back from spring break, there will be programs that will not be there,” he said. These actions, he said, are counterproductive to the work the city has done to prioritize youths since Gray’s death.

“A lot of young people wanted to see change,” he said, recalling the troubled state of the city’s schools. “They would say, ‘how can I be expected to learn if I can’t even drink from the water fountain?‘”

Since Gray’s death, Scott said the city has renovated 28 schools. There are now more job opportunities for youths through city-led efforts.

“They want to grow into the best version of themselves. And that is what we are trying to do,” he said.

Scott remarked how the death of Gray has inspired cultural expression — especially among rap, soul and spoken word artists.

“It’s the social consciousness of it that you can track back to the tragic death of Freddie Gray,” he said.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the number of arrests by police in Baltimore.