Lessons from Harlem

When I moved to New York City in 1980 at the age of 22, I almost never went near 125th Street, the unofficial boundary of Harlem, even though I lived only two blocks away in Morningside Heights, across the street from Riverside Church. Harlem, of course, was the beating heart of Black New York: the Harlem Renaissance, the Schomburg Library, the Apollo Theater, Sylvia’s Restaurant. It was also, less than two decades after the scarring riots of the 1960s, a place where white people just didn’t go. I’d heard the stories—junkies, drugs, guns, violence—and internalized the warnings. Little could I have imagined that by my late 20s I would find myself a fixture on Harlem’s main thoroughfare, one block east of the Apollo, playing harmonica with a Mississippi-born bluesman named Mr. Satan, or that we would break into the national market with the release of our debut album, Harlem Blues. The whole experience demolished the way I’d been programmed to think about Harlem, to put it mildly. It beg ... Read full article.