The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary is a collection of screenshotted tweets posted between April 19 and May 1, 2015, by young black residents of Baltimore. The tweets accompanied the two weeks of protests that followed the killing of twenty-five year old African American Freddie Gray in police custody.
The book opens with a tweet capturing the details of Gray’s death—comprising photographs and words—that was retweeted 2,964 times and liked 1,268 times (back then, “likes” were “favorites”). It ends with a monotonous nine-page series of tweets responding to a tweet featuring Gray’s portrait and coffin, subtitled by the request “Don’t Scroll Down Without Typing ‘R.I.P.’” The in-between, more or less chronological tweets—“by turns horrified, enraged, elated, humorous, tactical, analytic, and mundane” (Nicholas Thoburn, “Twitter, Book, Riot,” p. 98)—document the riots, battles with police, and looting, as well as the discussions about justice and the value of black life from the perspective of those involved. The tweets give the impression of authenticity and immediacy, evoking the intimacy of an epistolary novel, which is also the subtitle of the book. All Twitter handles and faces are blacked out to avoid identification, given the high number of tweets promoting or showing unlawful activity.
As Nicholas Thoburn reports, the anonymous editors researched the tweets not by hashtags (on the contrary, these were actually excluded), but by “homing in on local landmarks, malls, high-school proms, store names, and idiosyncrasies of the riots. They found that trending hashtags operated at a scale removed from the communicative scene of the uprising, and that at this scale Twitter served those from outside Baltimore who would appropriate the riots to their own ends” (Nicholas Thoburn, “Twitter, Book, Riot,” p. 104f.). In this way, they wanted to capture the journalist-free, unfiltered, and unmediated story “that the mainstream media chose to ignore; these voices deserve to be heard” (blurb on Amazon).
The 2015 Baltimore Uprising was initially published by the New Yorker radical zine collective Research and Destroy as a xeroxed pocketsize codex with a tape-covered spine and no ISBN, depriving it from global distribution as a typical “commodity book.” Instead, its small print run was distributed locally for free or at a low price. It utilizes the printed book as a more stable container for the preservation of social media posts, which might be altered, policed, or deleted, and removes the platform’s responsibility for documentation and preservation. Instead, readers and buyers of the book take on the role of distributed preservers and reminders.
This first edition was reprinted as a perfect bound paperback with a color cover, ISBN, and barcode on the back cover, and sold on Amazon and other platforms, using print-on-demand as a low-cost and relatively anonymous means of worldwide distribution. According to Thoburn, the second edition “is the recapture of an anti-commodity book by capitalist forms,” while at the same time making the first edition look like a pirate copy of the second.
Because the book was not published from within the scene of African American youth protestors it depicts, it raises questions about the role social media plays in constituting the public and the private, as well as the distribution of power in activism and publishing.
