The play tells stories about Baltimore in 1966 that have long been overshadowed by the biggest thing that happened that year: The Orioles beat the Dodgers four straight to win the World Series. It was the first world championship since Major League Baseball arrived in the city 12 years earlier, but its significance transcended sports, coming as it did midst the civil rights era. As if conjured in the cosmos, rather than through an off-season trade, two men named Robinson — Brooks and Frank, one white, the other Black — led the team to the pinnacle.

“The struggle to integrate baseball in general and the Orioles in particular mirrored the fight for civil rights that intensified throughout the country following the end of World War II,” writes baseball historian Bob Luke. “Integration of the Orioles, as was the case with many teams, came slowly. . . . The breakthrough came in 1966 with the arrival of a more enlightened owner, front office staff and African American superstar Frank Robinson.”

More than baseball
More than a baseball story, “No Mean City” adds to our understanding of the 20th Century forces that shaped Baltimore — decades of segregation, concentrated poverty, red lining and block busting, white flight, the collapse of big industry and the disappearance of union jobs, decades of opioid addiction, violent crime and the loss of a third of the city’s peak population since 1950. That’s a category 5 storm of social change — a hurricane of history that affected generations of Baltimoreans, and full recovery remains a huge challenge.

Before the riots
When I arrived in Baltimore at The Evening Sun in 1976, some of the veteran reporters I worked with had covered the 1968 riots following the April assassination in Memphis of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Though the assassination sparked the fires and lootings — and marked the beginning of a long period of struggles for the city — I always wondered what Baltimore was like in the years just previous. By 1966, civil rights leaders had been pushing for equality across the city — in public accommodations, in hiring — and they had the help of a progressive Republican mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, who was determined to keep Baltimore from collapsing into the unrest that had befallen other cities. But they faced white-hot resistance from long-time Baltimoreans and from segregationists, including the Ku Klux Klan, who came to town in the summer of 1966 to fight efforts to end racial discrimination in housing, restaurants and hotels.

Presidents and mayors
Hard to imagine in the Trump era, but there was a time when the President of the United States fully supported Baltimore and sent federal dollars to help the city kick-start the Inner Harbor redevelopment. It was President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat, who in the mid-1960s pledged support for what was then a dream of Baltimore’s last Republican mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin: Turning the old, industrial waterfront into a bright destination. Such a bipartisan, federal-local collaboration is from a once-upon-a-time America. Fifty years later, in his first term as president, Donald Trump called Baltimore a “rat-infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” In 2025, Mayor Brandon Scott heard Trump call Baltimore a crime-ridden “hell hole” and threaten to send troops even as the city made significant progress against persistent gun violence. The notion of bipartisan, federal-local collaboration has disappeared, and the Trump administration even signals hesitancy about funding something as vital as a replacement for the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge.

Journalist turns playwright
No Mean City: Baltimore 1966 completes a trilogy of plays about Baltimore by Dan Rodricks, who wrote an award-winning local column for The Baltimore Sun from January 1979 until January 2025. The stories are all drawn from newspaper accounts of people, places and events. The first two plays, Baltimore, You Have No Idea and Baltimore Docket were stage adaptations of columns Rodricks wrote for The Evening Sun and The Baltimore Sun. The storylines of No Mean City: Baltimore 1966 — about civil rights, the Orioles’ first world championship and the city’s last Republican mayor — are drawn almost exclusively from newspaper accounts of the time. Projected headlines and photographs accompany scenes throughout each play.

“I take some license to build dialogue,” Rodricks says, “because these are not mere re-enactments, based on transcripts or recordings, but plays, with drama and humor. So I can’t call what I’m doing strictly journalism, or even ‘theatrical journalism.’ But the characters and events are all based on my research. We are definitely in the realm of non-fiction. The first two plays are a series of scenes in which I bring some of my Sun columns to life. Audiences for No Mean City will see a very close depiction of what transpired in Baltimore in 1966.”