The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  As we resumed our walk, two boys who looked to be no more than ten darted in front of us.

  “You gonna play with your racer set?” one asked the other.

  “Yeah,” the other replied.

  “Can I play with it with you?” the first one pursued, anxiously.

  “Can’t get in my apartment,” said the other. “My mother ain’t home.”

  Looking disappointed, the two crossed the street and disappeared.

  We walked on, passing various groups with various interests—a stalled car drew quite a crowd—and we stopped in front of a small storefront housing the Harlem Revitalization Corps. One of a number of notices in the window read:

  Join the War on Apathy

  Winter Is Coming in Mississippi

  IGAD

  (I Give a Damn)

  Needs Clothes, Food, Books on Negro

  History, Dictionaries

  To Be Sent to

  IGAD

  Rev. Hickman Johnson, Chaplain

  Tougaloo College

  Tougaloo, Mississippi

  At the bottom of the notice, John F. Kennedy was quoted: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

  The storefront door was open, so we stepped inside, finding ourself in a room furnished with old chairs and a conspicuously old sofa. Notes tacked on top of notes covered a bulletin board in the center of the room (“From profits made on the fish fry the weekend of Aug. 25th and 26th we will be able to pay the rent.”…“Mrs. Smalls reports that the total of the treasury stands at $31.00”). A young woman entered from the rear, carrying a broom, and she told us that the purpose of the Revitalization Corps was to “broaden friendship.” Last summer, she went on, a number of Harlem children had changed places with children from the suburbs. “The experiment worked out beautifully,” she said. “We run the organization out of our own pockets.” We noticed that she seemed a bit impatient to put her broom to use, so, thanking her for her time, we went back outside.

  After taking a detour through A. Philip Randolph Square, we passed a building covered with posters and announcements—some out of date (Marcus Garvey Day), others yet to occur (“Naturally ’67—The original African Coiffure and Fashion Extravaganza Designed to Restore Our Racial Pride and Standards! Theme: Revolution and Riot in Ghettos or Self-Determination and Repatriation in Africa?…We Reserve the Right to Bar Anyone Whose Presence May Cause a Disturbance!”). Then we stopped on a street where a flatbed truck, pulled up to the curb, had attracted a gathering. On the floor of the truck were pumpkins, sacks of pecans and peanuts, and jars of honey. There were also stalks of sugar cane, bundled near the front of the truck, as we noticed when we heard a man, who had just come up, laugh and say, pointing to them, “Back where I come from, they call that uba, or iron cane.” He spoke with the lilt of the West Indies.

  “Well, where I come from, they make some good stuff from those cane skinnin’s,” said another man. “Shucks, man, you drink some of that and you’d be high for a month.” He spoke in a voice of the Deep South.

  By the time we reached the corner of 125th Street and Eighth Avenue, the early-afternoon crowds had broken up, except for a few shoppers around a vegetable stand and meat market. A couple standing in front of an attractive array of vegetables agreed that this was the best time of the year for collards, and a woman carrying an already well-stuffed shopping bag bought some beans, a few sweet potatoes, and some beets. In the window of the meat market were rows of ox tails, turkey wings, and chops, and a sign on the window advertised chitterlings and hog maws at bargain prices.

  As we moved farther down the block, we could see smoke and ash rising from what looked like the center of the demolition. One of the stores in that block is Mr. Lewis Michaux’s bookstore—the National Memorial African Bookstore—and when we drew near the corner, we could see that it was still standing, and so were most of the other buildings in the block. We stopped in to see how Mr. Michaux was getting along, and found him, as usual, bouncing around the store and keeping up lively conversations with six or seven people at once. “Everything’s quiet round here,” he was saying. “The Man been pouring a lot of milk in the streets, and milk’s what keeps the babies from squealing.” Suddenly, he turned to a man in an overcoat, and, taking him gently by the lapels, said, “You know what to do with the black man on the street?” There was a pause, and Mr. Michaux, letting go of the man’s coat, laughed and said, “Sell him Heaven, and if he don’t buy, give him Hell.”

  Mr. Michaux told us that he had been promised space in the new building but that so far he didn’t know what he was going to do between the time his present quarters were demolished and the time the new building was completed. “I would have preferred to stay here in this place, but the Man say he got to have his office building here. Well, I hear they’re going to set up a cultural center in the building, and if they do, then they got to have the National Memorial Bookstore, ’cause this is the look.” Mr. Michaux darted off again, and as we were leaving, one of two young girls who had been having a discussion for some time in front of a group of wall posters that were for sale called out to Mr. Michaux, “We’ve decided. We want one Rap Brown and one Stokely, please.”

  Around the corner, the signs of change were somewhat more evident. Fences constructed of old doors replaced the fronts of some buildings, and in other places along the block, where demolition had been completed, were small holes floored with splinters and jagged bricks and dust, from which a moldy smell emanated. A number of the stores carried on business as usual—shoestores, record shops, clothing stores—and others, though carrying on business, were plastered with signs, such as the one in the windows of Vim (VIM for Values; VIM for Discounts; VIM for Easy Terms): “VIM has been in business since 1920 and we will continue to serve you at a new location in this neighborhood! Thank you for your patronage.” Near us, a young Negro woman who looked to be in her early twenties stood leaning against a car with a sketch pad and pencil in her hands. After a few minutes, two young Negro men, who seemed to be about her age, walked up to her.

  “We’d like to know what you are doing,” one of them said.

  “I’m a student, and I’m doing a paper for one of my classes on the changing face of Harlem. I thought I’d do a sketch of this block, too,” the young woman said amiably. “Why do you want to know?”

  Both of the young men smiled. “Any time you write something down in this community, somebody’s gonna want to know what you’re writing,” one said. “Especially about the new building. We don’t want the wrong thing getting out.”

  The girl asked what he meant.

  “I mean, we want people to understand what this means to some of us,” he replied.

  “Just what does it mean?” the girl asked.

  “Well, let me put it to you this way,” the young man said. “The day Governor Rockefeller came up here to signal for the demolition to begin, one of the brothers came on the scene with his bugle and played ‘Taps.’ Now, believe me, sister, he was speaking for a lot of us. This is the beginning of the end.”

  At the end of the block, we turned into 126th Street—the northern border of the block, and the only part of it that is residential. We saw the same kind of splotchy destruction as on the side we had left—some brownstones completely vacated and boarded up, and, in the windows of others, curtains and an occasional flowerpot or some other sign of occupancy. Far down the block ahead of us we could see an old woman, in a black coat, moving slowly along the sidewalk. After a while, she came to a stop, rested for a few moments, and then, with a great deal of effort, started to climb the steps of a brownstone. On each step, she stopped to get her breath. By the time we reached her, she had climbed only three steps, and we asked her if she would like some help.

  She smiled faintly. “No, thanks,” she said.

  We asked her how long she had lived there.

  “Seventeen years,” she said, looking up toward the door, which was still
six steps away.

  “Will you be moving soon?” we asked.

  She said that she probably would. She told us that “the people over on a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street”—she couldn’t remember exactly where—had promised to help her find a place.

  We offered again to help her up the stairs, but she seemed determined to make it on her own. We told her as we left that we hoped she would find a place soon.

  She took another step and, while she was catching her breath, turned to us and smiled. “I’ll do the best I can,” she said.

  Jonathan Schell

  AUGUST 17, 1968 (A BIAFRA RALLY)

  ON THURSDAY OF last week, a group that calls itself the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive ran a full-page ad in the Times asking people to attend a demonstration beginning at 12:30 P.M. that day in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza whose purpose was to encourage world leaders and the United Nations to exert themselves more strenuously in the search for a way to bring relief to the estimated five million people who face starvation in Biafra. “Let’s not eat lunch,” the advertisement read. “Go to the United Nations and let the world know that no American will ever say: ‘But we didn’t know.’ ” We went over to Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza at six o’clock in the evening. There we found about seven hundred people attending the demonstration, and we were told that attendance had reached a peak of about twenty-five hundred at lunchtime. The crowd marched up and down the broad sidewalk in a long loop, keeping in the shade of two rows of trees. At the center of the loop there was a platform with a public-address system, which was playing Bach organ fugues when we arrived and later switched to Beethoven string quartets. Most of the demonstrators wore pins that said “Keep Biafra Alive.” These were being sold at a table at one end of the loop, for a minimum of twenty-five cents each. (By six o’clock, a carton used to hold the proceeds from these buttons was half filled with dollar bills.) And while some people were bringing money to buy food for the Biafrans, others were donating the food itself; there were two large and steadily growing piles of canned goods and packaged food on the sidewalk in front of the platform. Occasionally, women joining the demonstration would stop to unload a few cans of tuna fish or boxes of apricots from shopping bags and add them to the piles.

  We spoke to Philip Nix, a member of the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive, who spent two years in Biafra as a Peace Corps volunteer, and he told us that the committee had been formed around eight former Peace Corps volunteers who had been in Federal Nigeria or in Biafra. He said that until the war began, the Peace Corps had sent more volunteers to Nigeria than to any other country except India, and that by the middle of 1967 over fifteen hundred volunteers had worked there. We asked Mr. Nix how the committee had got going, and he said, “Some of us just got together at a party, and others called in when they heard about it. A few of us were in the same Peace Corps group and knew each other from Nigeria. We set up an office, and people would walk in off the street and say, ‘What can I do?’ Or people would call up and say, ‘This can’t happen!’ One man has taken a leave of absence from his job for the whole summer and risks losing it. A girl came in one evening and stayed and worked all night. We feel that the situation in Biafra is intolerable. We’re disgusted with the use of the word ‘politics’ in connection with this famine. We feel that there is a point at which people cease to exist solely for the sake of their government. What we want is an immediate air-lift, by the U.N. or by whatever government has the courage to do it. We aren’t taking sides politically. I think that we have to ask ourselves what the Nuremberg trials really meant. Are we willing to sit around while a whole people is destroyed?”

  The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand as the evening progressed, was composed mostly of people whom we took to be in their twenties. There was a noticeably large proportion of college-age girls, and a peppering of Africans and American Negroes. Some people carried signs consisting of large photographs of half-starved Biafran children, and others carried signs saying, among other things, “Stop Man’s Inhumanity.” As dusk fell, the demonstrators were handed lighted candles at one end of the loop. The candles lit up their faces from underneath, and they had to walk at a slower pace to keep the candles from blowing out. It appeared that most people had come to the demonstration alone or in twos, and as they walked silently around the loop in the darkness, carrying their signs or photographs and their candles, they expressed by faintly stiff postures and uneasy glances the embarrassment and sense of vulnerability that people tend to feel when they display themselves publicly for the sake of a strictly humanitarian cause—one that has no political intent, and is backed by no continuing movement or organization that could conceivably appeal to their self-interest or personal ambition.

  We joined the people walking around the loop to ask some of them what had drawn them there. Most of the ones we spoke with seemed shy about discussing their motivation, and ended up saying things like “I read the newspaper ad” or “I wanted to do something” or “I just came.” As we walked, we overheard two young men in business suits arguing over whether they had come for truly idealistic reasons or had really just wanted to get what one of them called “ego satisfaction.” They went on to discuss whether or not the demonstration would be effective. One carried a photograph of Biafran children, and the other carried a candle. We asked them what their work was, and they said they were computer consultants. We then talked with a white-haired man, who told us that he was a court stenographer, and that he had seen the ad in the paper. “I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what. This isn’t much—it probably won’t solve anything—but for a selfish bastard like me it’s something,” he said. We also spoke with three women—two Negro and one white—who were walking together. They said they were teachers, and one of the Negro women told us, “I saw the news in the papers, and from then on it was just a terrible nightmare. We just thought we had to do something.”

  Ellen Willis

  FEBRUARY 22, 1969 (FEMINISTS ON ABORTION)

  IN EACH OF the past three years, the New York State Legislature has defeated proposals to liberalize the state’s eighty-six-year-old criminal-abortion statute, which permits an abortion only when the operation is necessary to preserve a pregnant woman’s life. Now a reform bill introduced by State Assemblyman Albert H. Blumenthal, of New York County, appears likely to pass. It would amend “life” to “health,” and give relief to women who are physically or mentally unequipped to care for a child or who risk bearing a deformed child, to victims of rape and incest, and to the very young. A second bill is also pending. Sponsored by Assembly woman Constance Cook, of the 125th Assembly District, it would repeal the abortion law entirely and make abortion available on the same basis as any other medical treatment. The repeal bill has received little public attention. Newspapers that mention it at all tend to treat it as a quixotic oddity. Most people do not know that the Cook bill exists, and some legislators, when asked for their support, have professed not to have heard of it. A number of women’s organizations, however, are very much aware of the repeal proposal and are determined to spread the word. These groups are part of a revived—and increasingly militant—feminist movement. They include the National Organization for Women (NOW), the radical October Seventeenth Movement (a split-off from NOW), and Women’s Liberation, a collective label for radical feminist groups formed by women activists who found that men on the left too often expected them to type, make coffee, and keep quiet. Whatever their ideological differences, feminists have united on the abortion issue. They oppose Blumenthal’s reforms—or any reforms—and demand total repeal. Abortion legislation, they assert, is class legislation, imposed on women by a male-supremacist society, and deprives women of control over their bodies. They argue that women should not have to petition doctors (mostly male) to grant them as a privilege what is really a fundamental right, and that only the pregnant woman herself can know whether she is physically and emotionally prepared to bear a child.

  Last Thursday,
the Joint Legislative Committee on the Problems of Public Health convened in the Public Health Building, at 125 Worth Street, to hear a panel of expert witnesses—doctors, lawyers, and clergymen selected for their knowledge of medical, legal, and social problems connected with abortion—who were to comment on the law and suggest modifications. About thirty women, including City Councilman Carol Greitzer, came to the hearings to demonstrate against reform and for repeal, against more hearings and for immediate action, and against the committee’s concept of expertise. “The only real experts on abortion are women,” read a leaflet distributed by Women’s Liberation. “Women who have known the pain, fear, and socially imposed guilt of an illegal abortion. Women who have seen their friends dead or in agony from a post-abortion infection. Women who have had children by the wrong man, at the wrong time, because no doctor would help them.” The demonstrators, about half of them young women and half middle-aged housewives and professionals, picketed outside the building until the proceedings began, at 10 A.M. Then they filed into the hearing room. The eight members of the Joint Committee—all male—were lined up on a platform facing the audience. The chairman, State Senator Norman F. Lent, announced that the purpose of the meeting was not to hear public opinion but, rather, to hear testimony from “experts familiar with the psychological and sociological facts.” Of the fifteen witnesses listed on the agenda, fourteen were men; the lone woman was a nun.