As the sun set on Saturday evening, a few hours before the 10 PM curfew set in for the fifth consecutive night, Baltimore rapper Neru Isis began a chant from the stage of The Crown, a club on the north side of the city. “If we stand united, and have each otherʼs backs, we can take over the system, and take our freedom back!” they repeated until the crowd joined in, repeating it to the frenetic beat booming from the speakers.

As the crowd danced — almost two weeks after the arrest of Freddie Gray, the twenty-five-year-old who died after his allegedly illegal detainment by six Baltimore City police officers — a group in greater need of catharsis amassed near the intersection of Pennsylvania and North Avenues in West Baltimore.

The area, just blocks from the Gilmor Homes public housing complex where officers arrested Gray on April 12, has become a popular staging area for demonstrators protesting police brutality in Baltimore. It is here, where media trained their cameras last Monday on a burning CVS and destroyed police cars, that a sort of ad hoc festival atmosphere has taken hold in the daytime, bringing in people of all ages, ethnicities, and gender expressions — playing music, discussing developments related to protests in the city, and chanting for justice for Gray and other victims of police brutality.