"Take Me Out to the Ball Game"! PS 46 in Harlem Serenades Willie Mays

25 Years Later, Edmund Perry's Case Still Resonates

The predominate question after Edmund Perry’s death was not about the reality of police brutality, but rather how someone with so much promise and opportunity, could engage in such reckless behavior?

Twenty-five Years Later, Edmund Perry's Case Still Resonates
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

If there was a shared belief regarding the promises of the Civil Rights Movement, it was the faith that with the legal limits of segregation removed, young Black Americans would be able to achieve the American Dream if they adhered to a program of hard work and dutiful study.

In June of 1985, Harlem bred Edmund Perry seemed the embodiment of that faith, having just graduated from one of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools with his first year at Stanford University awaiting him in the fall. Instead, 17-year-old Perry was shot to death in his Harlem neighborhood by a White undercover detective, in what was “officially” termed an act of self-defense. Twenty-five years after his shooting, Edmund Perry’s death still resonates in meaningful ways.

On the evening of June 12, 1985, Perry and his 19-year-old brother Jonah, a second year student at Cornell University, were walking on Morningside Drive in Harlem. After a skirmish with an undercover police officer, Perry was shot in his abdomen and died shortly thereafter.

The story of Perry’s death elicited many public responses, particularly in the context of regular charges of police brutality directed at the New York City police department. Suspicions of the NYPD occurred in the aftermath of the questionable deaths of the graffiti artist Michael Stewart and 66-year-old Elenor Bumphers who was shot-to-death during a forcible eviction in the Bronx. As noted cultural critic Nelson George queried at the time of Perry’s death, “Was Edmund, like so many other victims of this city, just too black for his own good?”

Less than a month after Perry’s death, a police investigation cleared the officer of any wrongdoing and Jonah Perry was indicted on charges of assault of the police officer. Perry’s family was represented by attorney C. Vernon Mason, who along with attorney Alton Maddox, who successfully defended Jonah Perry, and the Reverend Al Sharpton, would form the political triumvirate that came to national prominence in the late 1980s in response to the rape case of Tawanna Brawley and the murder of Yusef Hawkins. Edmund Perry’s death was one of the many events that inspired Spike Lee’s depiction of racial tensions in New York City in his film "Do the Right Thing" (1989).

Yet the predominate question after Perry’s death was not about the reality of police brutality, but rather how someone with so much promise and opportunity, could engage in such reckless behavior?

Read the Full Essay @ theloop21.com

Remembering Luther Vandross

Luther Vandross: How Many Times Can We Say Goodbye?
by Michael A. Gonzales

Growing up in New York City, the late Luther Vandross—who died five years ago today—spent the first thirteen years of his life within the concrete confines of the infamous Lower East Side. Raised a few blocks away from the murky waters of the East River, not far from where smelly men used to sell fish on South Street, he lived in Smith Houses projects.

He was enraptured by the voices of LaBelle and Diana Ross, the three-minute symphonies that drifted from sound factories like the Brill Building and Motown, the lyricism of Smokey Robinson and Hal David. All these sounds inspired Vandross to walk the pop path.

“My friends and I would sit in our apartments listening to music and daydreaming about the singers we loved,” Vandross admitted during our first meeting in the fall of 1996. Sitting in a swank hotel suite a few months before the release of Your Secret Love, his tenth and last studio album for Epic Records, we were about 60 blocks and a million miles away from Vandross’s old ‘hood.

“We were obsessed. ‘I wonder what it’s like backstage at an Aretha Franklin concert?’ we would say. Or, ‘You know Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin both live in Detroit—I wonder if they go to lunch together, then go get their nails done?’ That was the kind of stuff going through our minds.”

Yet, unlike most young music fans who eventually move on to lead mediocre lives, Luther was determined to become a part of his own pop daydream. Accordingly, after being turned-out by Dionne Warwick conjuring her chilly mojo from the stage of Brooklyn’s famous Fox Theater, Vandross resolved that he too wanted to be a star.

Read the Full Essay at SoulSummer.com

Save The Schomburg!

Save The Schomburg

by Marc W. Polite

A mainstay of Harlem history is in danger of being dismantled. The collection of materials at the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture may be partitioned and sent to various branches of the New York Public Library. This in addition to the possibility of the Center’s collections being sent off to another research library should be an issue of great concern for the Harlem community in particular, and those in the African Diaspora in general. There is even talk of renaming the facility.

The Schomburg is a world reknown research library, and to treat its collection like its of little consequence is a mistake. Originally created in 1926, the Center has been a beacon for scholars, activists, and historians studying and gathering information. With director Howard Dodson slated to leave in February of 2011, the future of the research library is very much in jeopardy.

It should also be widely known that Henry Louis Gates, who has some highly questionable notions about African history, will be co-chairing the search committee for the new curator of The Schomburg. Given his tendency to downplay the facts of history in regards to the African Slave Trade, there is little confidence in Gates willingness to preserve the cultural heritage that the Center has represented for over 80 years. As America’s foremost post-racial scholar, Henry Louis Gates does not share the concerns of the residents of Harlem for the retention of its Black culture and history.

Read the Full Essay @ PoliteSociety

Eulogy for the 'Gang of Four' Era?

Paterson Scandal Scars a Piece of Harlem History

By SAM ROBERTS

David A Paterson was the great hope of Harlem’s Gang of Four. He was the instrument by which an extraordinary political quartet nurtured since professional infancy by the legendary Democratic leader J. Raymond Jones would impart their legacy to a younger generation of New York politicians.

That hope died with a thud on Friday.

David Paterson’s fall personifies something more than the end of a decades-old Democratic dynasty. It signifies the passing of the Old Guard in black politics in New York and other cities. Neighborhoods have changed. Black voters have dispersed. And politics has evolved into a less racial, if not quite a post-racial, period.

Just a week ago, as McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” blared from loudspeakers, Mr. Paterson formally declared his candidacy for a full four-year term as governor, an office he ascended to by a fluke in 2008. But, on Friday, with his campaign hobbled by a meager war chest and historically low popularity ratings, he announced that he was giving up the race. What finally drove him from the campaign were allegations reported in The New York Times that he and his State Police intervened in a domestic-abuse case involving one of his top aides.

Those allegations, by coincidence, were reported on the same day that a Congressional ethics committee admonished one of Mr. Paterson’s mentors, Representative Charles B. Rangel, the only member of the Gang of Four still in office, for accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean. Still pending are the ethics panel’s verdict on more serious questions involving his fund-raising, failure to pay federal taxes on rental income from a Dominican villa and his use of four rent-stabilized apartments provided by a Manhattan real estate developer.

Today’s Harlem is a very different place from the neighborhood that became a magnet for rural blacks from the South and spawned the Gang of Four: Mr. Paterson’s father, Basil, who was a deputy mayor, New York secretary of state, and a trailblazing Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor in 1970; David N. Dinkins, who became Manhattan borough president and the city’s first black mayor; Percy E. Sutton, the former Manhattan borough president, who died in December at age 89; and Mr. Rangel.

Blacks now account for only 3 in 10 residents of Mr. Rangel’s congressional district. In greater Harlem, running river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks no longer make up a majority of the population — a shift that occurred a decade ago after uptown blacks joined a growing contingent of Caribbean immigrants in better neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens. Even in central Harlem, their population has shrunk to the lowest since the 1920s — just after J. Raymond Jones arrived in the nation’s black cultural capital from St. Thomas.

Read the Full Article @ The New York Times

Edgecombe Avenue, Harlem, NY

In Sugar Hill, a Street Nurtured Black Talent When the World Wouldn’t
by David Gonzalez

New York is a city of blocks, each with its own history, customs and characters. Yet from these small stages spring large talents. Anyone who doubts that need look no further than a stretch of Edgecombe Avenue perched on a bluff near 155th Street.

It was part of Sugar Hill, the neighborhood of choice for elegant black musicians, dapper actors, successful professionals — and those who aspired to be like them.

A red-brick tower at 409 Edgecombe was home to Thurgood Marshall, W. E. B. DuBois and Aaron Douglas, who has been called “the father of black American art.”

A few blocks farther north, the building at 555 Edgecombe burst with musical talent: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lena Horne and others. Right before and after World War II, when discrimination and segregation were commonplace, young people in Sugar Hill saw success stride by on the streets where they played tag and stickball.

The son of a taxi mechanic, Roy Eaton was a childhood piano prodigy who became a trailblazer in advertising. His friends on the block included the artist and writer Faith Ringgold; Cecelia Hodges, a Princeton professor and actress; and Sonny Rollins, the “saxophone Colossus,” who is still touring.

Many of them came from Depression-era families who were short on cash but long on dreams, managing to scrimp for music lessons or art supplies. And they lived in a community where neighbors and churches offered encouragement amid rampant racial discrimination.

“It was like our place to dream the impossible dream,” Mr. Eaton said. “It gave me a sense of, you might call it entitlement or unlimited possibilities — that nothing could stop me from doing what I felt I could do.”

A few doors down from where Mr. Eaton grew up, Cecelia Hodges reveled in the joys of reading. She had gotten the bug from her parents, West Indian immigrants who moved to Edgecombe Avenue from farther south in Harlem so she could attend better schools. Before she started first grade, her father found out the books she would use and read them with her.

She eventually skipped three grades.

Yet it was at home and in the neighborhood that her education was rounded out. Like her friend Roy, she attended St. James Presbyterian Church, participating in pageants and singing in choirs. It was the kind of church where pride was reaffirmed — the choirs, for example, were named after black composers — and dignity defended.

Read the Full Article in The New York Times