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Dick DeMarsico, New York World Telegraph & Sun, incident at 133rd Street and Seventh Avenue during the Harlem Riots of 1964
Fifty years ago, the composer debuted his tape-loop experiment Come Out—a piece that put forth the voice of a man beaten by police, an injus
Daniel Hamm, the voice of Come Out.
“I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.”
Come Out (1966)
The way it’s always been.
New York City was under a citywide curfew Tuesday after a fifth night of protests. The curfew will last from 8 pm to 5 am every night until Sunday. Vehicle traffic below 96th Street will be banned within that time frame, with certain exemptions. The city’s last time enacting such an order was during the Harlem riots in 1943 that broke out in response to a white police officer shooting Private Robert Bandy, a Black WWII soldier on leave from his post in Jersey City. Bandy and his mother were staying at the Braddock Hotel when they came across the officer in an altercation with a Black woman. Bandy tried to intervene in the arrest but was shot in the shoulder. Rumors of a Black soldier’s death circulated and riots broke out. The citywide curfew lasted several days and resulted in hundreds of injuries, $5 million in property damage, and at least 5 deaths. Harlem community leaders said the riots were a result of the suppression of Black Americans. [Rolling Stone]
A crowd in Harlem shouts at police on Lenox Avenue during the Harlem uprising, 1964.
Photo credit: Buyenlarge
"It was the week after the Harlem Riot of 1964, a week of lurching around downtown streets like a war-zone refugee (whenever I heard a police or fire engine siren I would literally hit the pavement to flatten myself before the putative level of the flying bullets) that I realized I now was filled with hatred for everything and everyone white. Almost simultaneously it came to me that this condition, if it lasted, would mean I had lost the point: not to resemble my enemies, not to dwarf my world, not to lose my willingness and ability to love.
This was self-interested, to be sure. As Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer said, years later, as she stood on her porch in Mississippi, ''Ain' no such a thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God's face."
So, back in 1964, I resolved not to run on hatred but, instead, to use what I loved, words, for the sake of the people I loved. However, beyond my people, I did not know the content of my love: what was I for? Nevertheless, the agony of that moment propelled me into a reaching far and away to R. Buckminster Fuller, to whom I proposed a collaborative architectural redesign of Harlem, as my initial, deliberated movement away from the hateful, the divisive.
My first meeting with Bucky lasted several hours, just the two of us, alone. And when we separated, agreed on the collaboration for Esquire magazine, I felt safe in my love again. We would think and work together to design a three-dimensional, an enviable, exemplary life situation for Harlem residents who, otherwise, had to outmaneuver New York City's Tactical Police Force, rats, a destructive and compulsory system of education, and so forth, or die.
This was a way, a scale, of looking at things that escaped the sundering paralysis of conflict by concentrating on the point, the purpose of the fight: What kind of schools and what kind of streets and what kind of parks and what kind of privacy and what kind of beauty and what kind of music and what kind of options would make love a reasonable, easy response?"
⸺ June Jordan, Civil Wars
Harlem, NYC.
August 1943.
Demonstrators carry photographs of Lt. Thomas Gilligan, NYPD who shot and killed 15-year-old James Powell, Harlem, New York, July 1964.
Yea, so it be I leave this thought with thee Do not attempt to fuck with me.
A message to Harlem police by an anonymous "zoot suiter," 1943
Steve Reich - 'Come Out' for tape
