Boss of the Grips: Interview with Eric K. Washington

Interviewed by Prithi Kanakamedala

Today on the blog, Prithi Kanakamedala talks to Eric K. Washington about his current work, Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal. This book has garnered a great deal of praise, including citation as one of the Best Biographies of 2019 by Open Letters Review and special recognition from The Municipal Art Society of New York as a 2020 Brendan Gill Prize Finalist.

Interviews, Race & Ethnicity, TransportationGuest UserMay 21, 2020Comment

“Skull Trouble”: A Brief History of Police Harassment of Black New Yorkers

By Marcy S. Sacks

As a fresh recruit to the New York City police force at the turn of the twentieth century, Dutch immigrant Cornelius Willemse learned an important lesson from his superior officer about how to treat the black residents on his beat. One day, the novice patrolman encountered a group of black men congregating on a street corner. He attempted to disperse the group. “At my order to move along,” he recalled, “they shuffled off slowly, dragging their feet on the sidewalk, in a way which seemed to say, ‘Feet, we’ll be back as soon as this fool cop is gone.’” Angered by their perceived insolence, Willemse decided that they were “ripe for a lesson.” Without warning, he began beating any black man within reach, “work[ing] with the old nightstick as hard as I could.” In short order, “Negroes were lying all over the sidewalk, some of them half conscious, others bruised and bleeding.” He smugly evaluated his success. “I had made good on my threat of ‘skull trouble.’” He expected no further difficulty from them.

Crime & Policing, Race & EthnicityGuest UserApril 23, 2020Comment

Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem

By Marta Gutman

Faced with intransigent bureaucracy, struggling schools, deteriorating buildings, and entrenched racial segregation, parents in Harlem demanded direct control over the core functions of public education in the 1950s and 1960s. One new building became a flashpoint in the battle for community control—Intermediate School (IS) 201, the infamous windowless school that abuts the Park Avenue railroad viaduct two blocks north of East 125th Street, straddling Central Harlem and East Harlem. White architects and politicians, including the mayor, John Lindsay, rallied to defend “Harlem’s besieged masterpiece,” but parents in Harlem disagreed.[1] The location and the architecture, which many of them opposed, stood as a constant reminder of their unmet demands, from exclusion in policy making to broken promises of integration.

Education, Manhattan, Race & EthnicityGuest UserMarch 25, 2020Comment

Bringing Harlem to the Schools: Langston Hughes’s The First Book of Negroes and Crafting a Juvenile Readership

By Jonna Perrillo

Chapter 5 of Educating Harlem examines Langston Hughes’s production of the often-overlooked The First Book of Negroes as a vantage point into how the author transformed ideas, images, and business practices that he developed as a young Harlem Renaissance writer to educate children during the Cold War. Moreover, thinking about the book’s readership provides a view into the politics of the books Harlem and New York City children otherwise were reading in 1950s classrooms. Hughes’s political critiques in The First Book of Negroes dated to some of his most seminal works as a writer in the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout his life and career, Hughes remained committed to the same questions that thrived at the heart of the Renaissance, including: What constitutes black culture and art? What are the responsibilities of the black artist to himself and his or her community? Can cultivating a black readership serve as a pathway to community advancement? And what is the role of a black aesthetic—and the black diaspora—within a larger U.S. culture? Now, he translated these questions into a genre for the people he saw as the most vulnerable and most in need of nuanced and humane accounts of black experience and accomplishment: children.

Education, Manhattan, Race & EthnicityGuest UserMarch 24, 2020Comment

Interview with Ansley Erickson, co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community

Interview with Ansley Erikson, co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community

Interviewed by Dominique Jean-Louis

This week on Gotham we hear from the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP), a multi-platform program at Columbia University that includes a digital collection, exhibits, and the recently published Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, as well as many other resources for teaching the history of education. Today, Dominique Jean-Louis interviews the Project’s co-director, Ansley T. Erickson, co-editor of the book.

Education, Interviews, Manhattan, Race & Ethnicity, Poverty & InequalityGuest UserMarch 23, 2020Comment

“An American Organization, a Hundred Per Cent”: The Competing Legacies of New York’s First Neo-Nazis, the National Renaissance Party

By Anna Duensing

In July 1963, the New York branch of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized demonstrations in the Bronx to protest hiring discrimination at White Castle hamburger stands. An “undercurrent of racism” existed throughout the North, stressed James Farmer, National Director of CORE.

Postwar New York, Race & EthnicityGuest UserMarch 17, 2020Comment

Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York

Reviewed by Emily Brooks

Black and Hispanic or Latino youth are dramatically overrepresented in the city’s detention facilities. In addition to their overrepresentation in youth detention, black teens are also far more likely than whites to experience police brutality or harassment. Some of the widely-publicized examples include, mostly recently, a horde of NYPD drawing their guns and violently arresting an unarmed black teen on a crowded subway car, and officers filmed punching black teenagers in the face while supposedly breaking up a fight. From cell phone footage and Facebook posts to records produced by youth detention facilities and scholarly research in various disciplines, a substantial body of material attests to the over-criminalization and under-protection of youth of color, particularly black youth, in contemporary NYC. For anyone looking to understand the historical roots of our contemporary regime of racialized youth criminalization, Carl Suddler’s Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York will be essential reading.

Crime & Policing, Postwar New York, Race & Ethnicity, ReviewsGuest UserMarch 12, 2020Comment

DyckmanDISCOVERED: Fostering Inclusive Historical Narratives

By Meredith Sorin Horsford

In 2015, the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum (DFM), which had been a very traditional historic site with little relationship to its community, came under new leadership. Soon after, DFM became the recipient of a grant program called shatterCABINET with the Chipstone Foundation, which provides funding to rethink how historic house museums can be relevant to their present-day community. Through this grant, the Dyckman Farmhouse removed all of the room barriers that had previously prevented visitors from entering the period rooms, installed bilingual labels and signage, and began offering bilingual programs, promotional materials, and visitor services. This not only impacted the audience that we serve, as neighborhood residents began visiting the museum for the first time, but it also helped the organization reshape public programs to feature interpretation that connects the history of the site and its rural roots to the present-day urban community.

Slavery & Antislavery, Race & Ethnicity, ManhattanGuest UserFebruary 18, 2020Comment

Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, interviewed by Tyesha Maddox

In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof’s book presents a vivid portrait of these largely forgotten revolutionaries and reveals the complexities of race-making within migrant communities and the power of small groups of immigrants to transform their home societies.

Interviews, Manhattan, Podcasts, Race & Ethnicity, ImmigrationGuest UserFebruary 11, 2020Comment

The Rise and Fall of The Young Lords

Johanna Fernandez, interviewed by Beth Harpaz

One of the most influential groups of the radical ’60s was the Young Lords, an organization of poor and working class Puerto Ricans that began as a street gang and rose to confront the racism of institutions from government to religion. Johanna Fernandez, a professor of history at Baruch College, traces their roots and tells the story of their rise and fall in The Young Lords: A Radical History.

Crime & Policing, Interviews, Podcasts, Poverty & Inequality, Race & EthnicityGuest UserFebruary 6, 2020Comment