Word: 125th
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Harlem is the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, the black Times Square, where orators on soapboxes or folding chairs harangue passersby to "buy black" or "get whitey." In the shadow of the Theresa Hotel, where Fidel Castro plucked his chickens and Cassius Clay celebrated the feathering of his nest, Lewis Michaux composes Black Nationalist doggerel...
...just one block north, the fresh breezes and greenery seem a planet distant. Here is 111th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, infested with prostitutes and dope addicts. Up a ways, at 118th and Lenox Avenue, is "junkie's corner," and at the New York Central overpass at 125th Street, over which suburban commuters ride every day between air-conditioned offices and well-kept homes, Negro prostitutes wait for white johns who know the spot and drive by in their cars...
This is Harlem's heart, and 125th Street is its aorta. Here is Frank's Restaurant, crowded with white merchants at lunchtime, but thronged at dinnertime with middle-class Negroes, who are served with unctuous concern by white waiters. Here is Blumstein's, the only real department store in Harlem, but hardly a match for a midtown five and clime. And here is the Baby Grand, where Nipsey Russell's successor, Comedian Ray Scott, folds his hands, raises his eyes and beseeches...
...done one way or the other," thunders James Lawson, president of the United African Nationalist Movement, head of the Harlem Council for Economic Development and a thoroughgoing demagogue. What Lawson means is clear. Last April half a dozen Negro punks entered a husband-and-wife clothing store on 125th Street, got into an argument and stabbed the wife, Mrs. Magit Sugar, to death with a double-edged dirk. Lawson said that the store, once worth $5,000, could now be bought from disconsolate Frank Sugar, a Hungarian refugee, for $150. Similar "expropriations," he predicts, will take place if whites...
Fragmented Leadership. Even when they are on the scene, Harlem's leaders are quarrelsome and grasping. A few weeks ago, the Rev. Robert M. Kinloch, head of a largely paper outfit called the Independent Community Improvement Association, turned up to picket a 125th Street cafeteria to protest "the lack of a black face behind the counter." Suddenly the Rev. Nelson Dukes turned up to "mediate" in his capacity as head of the Blue Ribbon Organization for Equal Opportunity Now. The pickets shouted "Uncle Tom" at Dukes, and Kinloch complained, "This is my demonstration and my pickets...