B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa

  Other political actors in Harlem made less lofty appeals. The Friends of Negro Freedom was founded in 1920 by union organizers A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. They openly reviled Garvey. Their magazine, The Messenger, carried the following notice:

  PREPARE TO DEFEND YOURSELF!

  Negroes are rapidly coming North. Already large numbers are here. It is foolish to think that they can come from the ignorant, backward South, where even white people are “far behind the times,” and step right into a new heaven, as it were, in the highly complicated and specialized industrial system they find at their journey’s end.

  THE FRIENDS OF NEGRO FREEDOM OFFERS A WAY OUT.

  The F.N.F. Program for 1923: Organize 100 Councils; Help Unionize Negro Migrants; Protect Tenants; Push the Co-operative Movement Among Negroes; Organize Forums for Publicly Educating the Masses.

  The imperial ambitions of Garvey and the socialist project of the Friends of Negro Freedom took opposite approaches to a common plight. There was, as Garvey’s vision suggested, much to live for, and, as The Messenger warned, much to lose.

  Walking down Lenox, going from the library to a meeting, I saw the Chief again. He was resting on the walker he uses to move around, planted on its seat, with his back against the plate-glass window of a variety store. It calls itself a department store, but it is really an overpriced ninety-nine-cent shop, and probably not a location where one could Buy Black. He was not passing out flyers.

  I did not ask why he had paused there; he didn’t ask whether I’d acquired a platform. Instead, the Chief stared across the street and began to speak aloud the words that must have been filling his head before I interrupted him. I see fleeting images, he told me. Fleeting images, he said again. The images before his eyes did not stand up to those in his mind. He told me that when he arrived here from Chicago, he was a young man who’d been hanging out around the University of Chicago. I told him that my grandfather had been a student there around the same time. He said he might have known him, but that he was not attending the school but mixing with its black intellectuals, trying to become one, too. He’d come to New York to study theater, and a trace of this training was still evident in his diction and his bearing. I tried to imagine him in his pre-African Nationalist Pioneer days. With tones that mixed contempt for his past ambitions with slight wistfulness, he mentioned that he’d wanted to go to Paris.

  Chicago, he said, had fostered in him what he called the Booker T. mentality. It was a quality the Chief felt was lacking among New York blacks. He said the source of the distinction was that in Chicago the ruling white ethnic groups (Germans and Irish) had left the blacks more or less to their own devices; thus, he said, they had a kind of independence. According to the Chief, in New York a black man could not move without having to ask the white man and the Jew for permission.

  Upon arriving in New York, his Booker T. mentality was stimulated by what he called the dynamic, revolutionary, charismatic leadership of Carlos A. Cooks. Thus did he assume his African name and dedicate his life to the cause of Pan-Africanism. From his early days with the ANPM, the Chief recalled to me a fellow member who was from Texas. That place of origin had not only made him prone to the platform of the ANPM, but this Pan-Africanist Texan was also a vicious political operator, known for murdering his foes. I was curious to know more about that. But the Chief changed the subject. He wanted to talk about my hair.

  My hair was relevant because, as the Chief went on to explain, I would not be wearing my hair in its natural, unprocessed African state if it had not been for the dynamic, revolutionary, charismatic leadership of Carlos A. Cooks, who, in addition to the Buy Black platform had also arranged the Natural Standard of Beauty contests, through which the beauty of African hair in its natural state was promoted, during the 1950s, long before the Afro was in vogue. He pointed out this legacy with pride and also with some bitterness, for the genius and originality of Cooks’s ideas about black being beautiful had been usurped by a subsequent decade. Other women passed by as we spoke: their braids, dreadlocks, and other natural styles supported his standards, as those wearing weaves and wigs of various shades, from blonde to fuchsia, defied them.

  Next, he complained about my name. Why did I have an Arabic name? Why didn’t I drop that name and find one from an African queen? I did not take time to explain that my parents had chosen the name Sharifa from that classic of 1960s and 1970s cultural nationalism Know and Claim Your African Name. It was still on the bookshelves of our home in Texas. As children, my sister and I used to take it down occasionally to study its pages, which featured line drawings of men and women with Afro hairstyles, with great reverence. When we needed to find names for new dolls or our puppy, we consulted the worn pamphlet that had been the source of our own names.

  I did not explain how, in that publication, the origin of my name had been given as Swahili for “honorable” or “distinguished,” which is how I always explained my name growing up. At that point, neither I nor my parents were considering, as the Chief was now, the problem of the Arab trade in salt, gold, and slaves. Swahili, the lingua franca of southern and eastern Africa, is a language born of commerce and invasion and other inconvenient aspects of cultural collision. It contains many words and names that are Arabic in origin, including my own. Only as an adult did I learn that, according to a more strict definition, my name was a title referring to direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and was thus objectionable to the anti-Islamic sensibilities of the Chief. I didn’t protest. He probably wouldn’t have been satisfied unless I had announced just then on Lenox Avenue that I was taking the name Hatshepsut. And I didn’t point out to the Chief that his own second name was taken from an Egyptian pharaoh who had probably enslaved Nubians to work his mines, and was likely the pharaoh during the time of the Exodus.

  A family of West Africans passed us. The little girls—claiming the sidewalk with the self-possession evident in their ram-rod posture—wore long skirts and hijabs, a walking tableau of all the Chief had just been speaking of. They did not escape his scrutiny. He did not understand, he said, why so many African immigrants were now crowded into Harlem, clamoring to live in America. He predicted that they will curse the day they brought their children here, when their daughters are treated like prostitutes and their sons are rotting in jail.

  The Chief said the condition of black people in America amounted to genocide, but everybody’s walking around like everything’s cool. He repeated that phrase a few times as we spoke. I looked around us, where everyone was milling around like everything was, indeed, cool.

  I left him there on Lenox Avenue. I was late for another meeting.

  HARLEM TOWN HALL MEETING

  “Building a movement to Save the neighborhood, soul and spirit of the village of Harlem”

  Let us take this stand together so that history will record that the people of African Descent who turned Harlem into an international showcase of Black pride, political struggle and achievement fought against their own demise!

  The purpose of this meeting was to discuss strategies against Columbia University’s plan to expand its campus into seventeen acres of West Harlem. The meeting featured several speakers explaining different aspects of the situation. There was the historical context of Columbia’s earlier incursion into Harlem during the 1960s, when a plan to build an athletic facility by taking over public land from Morningside Park was scuttled by community outrage. There was the complicity of various black politicians who were either past or present employees of Columbia, and who were either supportive of the university’s plan or would remain silent. There were the Columbia students organizing in solidarity with the community, a few of whom would later go on hunger strike. There was Columbia’s decision to ignore the expertise of at least one scientist who issued urgent warnings about the catastrophe of building a subterranean research facility—where potentially hazardous experiments would take place—in an area known to be at risk of submersion during storm surges. And there was th
e awkward twist that the scientist was a member of Columbia’s own faculty. There was, above all, the doctrine of eminent domain, which allowed the seizure of private land for the construction of buildings or infrastructure to enhance the public good. The expansion of Columbia University’s private dormitories and private research facilities could be deemed, after an exhausting stretch, to enhance the public good, but it would also continue a dangerous precedent, following a Supreme Court decision that essentially extended the definition of “public good” to include dispossessing swathes of the public if rich and influential private entities found it good.

  As part of a public relations campaign waged with the assistance of a well-connected black lobbying firm, Columbia placed advertisements in the Amsterdam News featuring black and brown faces promoting the university’s benevolence as an employer and institutional neighbor. At the meeting, someone suggested taking up a collection to fund a counteractive ad campaign. It would feature the black and brown faces of people who would be displaced, or whose jobs would be lost, because of the Columbia expansion. Some people at the meeting contributed money right away, but those funds were reimbursed only a few moments later. It soon became clear that no entity claimed or wanted to claim the authority to collect the cash. No actual plan had been devised or would be executed.

  That meeting was the first time I’d heard of the city’s plan to rezone 125th Street. It was the next struggle coming down the pipeline. But at that moment, it all seemed distant and theoretical. Everyone was exhorted to go to a hearing on the Columbia case that was to happen in a few days. Many people did go; it was so crowded that most who wished to testify could not even get inside. I did not go to testify. I walked around among the people milling outside, asking questions and taking notes.

  I spoke with one man who didn’t know why he was there. He was passing out materials from “the Coalition for the Future of Manhattanville.” That organization’s name and reading materials were oddly similar to that of the Coalition to Preserve Community, the group of neighbors and activists who led opposition to Columbia’s plan. But the Coalition for the Future of Manhattanville was in favor of the expansion, and it was not, exactly, a grassroots organization. It was launched by the same political consulting firm that placed the pro-Columbia advertisements in the Amsterdam News. The man passing out the pro-Columbia materials told me he didn’t know anything about the plan. He’d been brought in a van of residents from a facility for recovering addicts in East Harlem. Upon arriving, they’d all been given stickers and told to pass out flyers in support of Columbia’s expansion.

  Seeing my notepad, an older man approached, eager to be recorded. He wore a wrinkled suit and white socks with his black dress shoes, but he had not arrived early enough to be allowed inside the hearing. At first he spoke to me in a mix of Spanish and English, and then he leaned close and said in a low voice: They are going to drive us into the river.

  I saw fleeting images, too. Long after they had ceased to refer to any existing program or administration, I saw signs from the Koch and Dinkins mayoral regimes hanging from the fire escapes of buildings. These announced the successes of alternative management programs, empty building projects, or weatherization upgrades according to the latest standards of two decades past. Nearby were newer signs, offering condominiums for sale. I saw the names of James Weldon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Phillip Randolph attached to public housing projects. I remembered James Weldon Johnson’s prophetic questions:

  What will Harlem be and become in the meantime? Is there danger that the Negro may lose his economic status in New York and be unable to hold his property? Will Harlem become merely a famous ghetto, or will it be a center of intellectual, cultural and economic forces exerting an influence throughout the world, especially upon Negro peoples? Will it become a point of friction between the races in New York?

  Some have suggested that the mere presence of the projects in Harlem is the reason black people will, as James Weldon Johnson put it, hold Harlem. But there are condominiums going up directly across the street from the projects, and like the public housing buildings from the past, the condominiums are given names that are meant to inspire. The condominium Dafina neighbors the St. Nicholas houses; its name is Swahili for “a thing of value.” Residents with southern-facing units in the Kalahari have an intimate view of the Martin Luther King Jr. houses. The Kalahari is named for the desert into which the Herero people of southwestern Africa were driven after the murderous exploits of German imperialists who usurped the most fertile land of what is now Namibia, a genocide known as Germany’s first Holocaust, for which the Herero seek reparations. Other new buildings look to Harlem’s cultural heritage for naming inspiration, so we have the Ellison, the Langston, the Fitzgerald, the Lester, the Renaissance, and the Rhapsody.

  A. Philip Randolph Square, a triangle formed by the intersection of Seventh and St. Nicholas avenues with 116th Street, is marked by a quote from Randolph: The idea of separatism is hearkening to the past, it is undesirable even if it could be realized, because the progress of mankind has been based upon social, intellectual, and cultural contact.

  Two blocks away, on 114th Street, a row of tenement buildings now serves as public housing. The housing development also bears the name of A. Philip Randolph, while failing to uphold his ideals about the progress of mankind. The block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was taken over by the city in the 1960s as an innovative experiment in slum clearance intended to preserve the original housing stock and the intricate community network by renovating houses without displacing their occupants. The block went from being slums to being a jewel of the public housing system, but now it is slums again. Many of the houses on that street are boarded up. It is not possible to tell if they are in a state of abandonment or a state of suspended renovation. The effect is the same: no one lives there.

  At one meeting about the rezoning of 125th Street, a speaker shouted out, And you know what happened to Eighth Avenue! What happened to Eighth Avenue was that in 1998 a private developer acquired several city-owned vacant lots and buildings for “middle-income housing,” a proposal that passed the local Community Board with reservations: Some members were concerned that it could lead to gentrification of the neighborhood. That is one reason they are asking the developers to include community groups in planning and construction. This included promises of locally based general contractors, workers and handymen on the site. What happened on Eighth Avenue was a rezoning, specifically, forty-four blocks of Frederick Douglass Boulevard were rezoned in 2003 to abolish height restrictions and enhance development potential. The area now boasted a strip of upscale condominium developments from just above the park to 125th Street, along with the requisite amenities: dueling wine shops, a few cafés, choice places for Sunday brunch, a boutique selling pet accessories, and new satellite offices for New York’s most exclusive real estate brokers.

  On West 115th Street, near the corner of Eighth Avenue, a sign invites passersby to attend a meeting. The location of the advertised meeting, to have taken place in 2002, is the building to which the sign is affixed. But most of the windows and entrances of that building have been sealed over. In strange contrast there is no exterior door on the building. The vestibule is exposed to the street and its once fine tile mosaic is in disrepair.

  Not far from there is the home of the Bilalian Center, a black Muslim outfit consisting of a barbershop and a convenience store, among other enterprises. The place gets its name from Bilal, the freed black slave who, after the prophet and his followers captured Mecca, was chosen by Muhammad to sound the first call to prayer from atop the Kaaba, the black rock in the center of the world, with the gate of heavens directly above. The Bilalian Center is closed. One sign announces a meeting from several years ago. The theme of the meeting was Keeping the Promise.

  I have been to Promise Land.

  It is a building at the corner of 146th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. Promise Land is spelled out on the glass doo
r of the building with carefully placed individual decal letters. Every time I pass it, I admire the unusual shape of that building. It sits on a corner, meeting the intersection with a gracefully rounded tower that goes up the side of the building like a turret. Just a few blocks up St. Nicholas Avenue is the brownstone where Ralph Ellison lived while writing Invisible Man. Its significance is not commemorated. When I last walked by, there was a sign offering it for sale through an exclusive real estate firm.

  Whether or not Promise Land is occupied is a mystery. The door looks to be in regular use, but the windows are mostly boarded up—though at night, one partially obstructed window gives off a light from the lower level.

  It all comes down to a point that is as simple as it is terrible. It is a fact that closes in on itself, like the mythical serpent that devours its own tail: This is our land that we don’t own. At times the terrible simplicity of that fact was expressed at those various meetings, as the case for the moral claim to Harlem asserted by black people was detailed, with eloquence and power, in staggering litanies of abuses, triumphs, and betrayals, both historical and contemporary. But having enumerated such sorrows to the chairwoman of the New York City Planning Commission, most would have been met with a semirobotic smile before she said, as she did to me at the two hearings where I and many hundreds of others gave testimony opposing the city’s plan, Thank-you-will-you-please-submit-your-written-testimony-for-our-consideration.