Word: harlem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Simpson knows the problems of inner-city schools firsthand, having grown up in New York City's Harlem. Her public-school teachers were "tough and demanding," she recalls, and steered her to academic success. She was then spotted by "A Better Chance," a privately funded program that selects what she describes as "poor but promising" students for private schools. She attended the Waynflete School in Portland, Me., then enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College...
...their heads and hands to work fighting misery." Although the city plans to evict Beacon from the vacant lot to build subsidized housing on the site, the Fire Tender does not intend to let his flame go out. His next temple, he says, will be in Spanish Harlem...
American blacks fled to Northern cities at the beginning of the 20th century fired with new dignity, purpose and activism. Black artists in particular took on the role of interpreters of their culture and made northern Manhattan a Paris for the "New Negro." Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (Abrams; 200 pages; $35) documents this flowering, from the Paris-trained sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, who built her studio with her own hands, through Painter William H. Johnson, who renounced his academic style for a self-enforced primitivism, to James Van Der Zee, whose camera was witness to Harlem weddings...
...manuscripts he had piled up in his grimy little hotel room -- all the retyped drafts and new inserts and scribbled revisions -- really was a novel and would someday make him famous. A short and rather pudgy youth with froggy eyes, Jimmy had worked on this book about his Harlem boyhood for five or six years back in the U.S. But he had run through a publisher's advance without getting the novel finished. He had worked at odd jobs, waiting on tables in Greenwich Village...
...novel finished. "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else," he later told the New York Times. "I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father." His father -- stepfather, actually -- had been a Harlem preacher so possessed by anger that he regularly beat his children. "His father's arm, rising and falling, might make him cry," Jimmy wrote in the autobiographical Mountain, "yet his father could never be entirely the victor, for John cherished something that his father could not reach...