Word: harlem
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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TRICKY TOM IS AT IT AGAIN read one of the placards waved by 40 or so pickets in front of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum last week. They were protesting Director Thomas P. F. Hoving's choice of material for "Harlem On My Mind," an exhibition devoted to "the cultural capital of Black America, 1900-1968." The show contained no paintings by black artists - or, for that matter, by white artists. Organized by Allon Schoener, Visual Arts Di rector of the N. Y. State Council on the Arts and a white man, with Negro Audio Engineer Donald Harper...
Even before it opened, "Harlem On My Mind"* had drawn brickbats. John Canaday, the New York Times's senior art critic, declared that he would not review the show. "Apparently," he sniffed, it had "no art." Mayor John Lindsay charged that an essay by a 17-year-old Harlem schoolgirl, reprinted in the catalogue and containing a remarkably mature discussion of anti-Semitism among Negroes, was "racist." Apparently as a result of his charges, 60 guests invited to the opening canceled...
Whether "art" or not, the show is marvelously evocative and dramatically presented. The first galleries, filled with old pictures and resounding to taped melodies of spirituals and ragtime, depict Harlem as it was in the early years of the century: a prosperous white neighborhood. By 1905, Negroes from the South had begun to trickle in-living then, as now, in appallingly overcrowded quarters. In those far-off days, as recorded by James Vanderzee, a gifted but little-known Harlem photographer who is now 82, Negroes did their best to look more respectable than whites, genteelly taking tea in beauty parlors...
During the 1920s, when many welfare agencies refused to care for Negroes, Harlem's struggling middle classes looked after their own sick, poor and aged. They also sponsored a "Black Renaissance," led by W.E.B. Du Bois and his magazine, Crisis...
...Charles ("Lucky") Luciano. The Cosa Nostra now operates through 25 to 30 "families," totaling about 5,000 members. Five families and about one-third of the total troops are based in New York City, where Valachi grew up as the son of a hard-drinking pushcart peddler in East Harlem...