JULY 2007
NEW WHITE
RESIDENTS SAY "NO" TO BLACK CULTURE IN HARLEM-
RALLY TODAY
Rally today, Saturday at 4PM at
MARCUS GARVEY PARK @ 5th Avenue at 124th street side. Our
new White "neighbors" have decided that we
should not be allowed to practice our culture. They also
want to change the name of the park from Marcus Gavey
Park back to Mt. Morris Park. If you agree with
them, stay home.
Kwame
Whenever in Harlem, we go to the park
where we can hear the drums. It's part of our culture. I
am trying not to be angry but this further attempt to
disrespect our traditions makes my blood rise. Please
pass the word.
for
immediate release
Marcus Garvey Park Drummers,
July 2 2007
Sat June 30 two white police officers approached drummers
at 5th Ave Marcus Garvey park, at about 7:30pm, stating
that they received complaints about the drumming being to
loud.
Two spokes persons, a man and woman, from the drummers
organization told the officers, 'We have been drumming
every week until nine p.m. for the last thirty years ',
They asked the officers why were they coming now when it
was only 7:30pm. The officers responded that the
residents at 2005 5th Ave (across the street) had
complained that the drumming was too loud. The drummers
said “We will continue until 9 pm”.
The policemen then called for reinforcement, when a car
with a bar officer came , the drummers spokesperson
continued along the lines of their right to drum,
“it's our culture from Africa and the
Caribbean” One women drummer said about the
white residents. 'They have forced Black people out of
Harlem to move here, they knew that we drum here every
week, if they don't want to hear the drumming they should
move”
Still another police car came, this time with lights, and
about nine policemen. With the drummers, women, children
and men around eighty people, the drummers resisted their
position and continued to drum, while an assigned
spokesperson talked to police offers.
Across the street at Fifth Ave condo (124) the four white
residents watched while the struggle continued. The
drummers, dancers and crowd took out their cellphones and
video cameras recording. After 25 minutes the police
backed down and the drummers drummed louder as a protest
and message to the white residents that they will fight
for their African culture.
| letter from Kwame: As
to that. I got the notice that morning also, and
forwarded it right away. The crowd was good, but
the drummers seem to be willing to settle for
another space in the park that is 1) Secluded and
possibly dangerous to those coming to see them 2)
very high up on the steps behind the
amphitheatre, a climb that could give many above
40, a heart attact, 3) although
"guaranteed", they will have to move if
there is an event in the amphitheatre and have to
go even further up to the Bell Tower. |
Please join us next Saturday July 7th to help support the
Marcus Garvey Park drummers in their struggle against the
ongoing police harassment.
Statement written by
Johnnie Stevens
By Phone :
866-527-2545
update:Last
night's drumming was uninterrupted by any disturbance
from new residents or authorities. All day long,
according to one attendee, people had been coming to the
park to offer support. At 7:30 there were at
least 100 people, a dozen or more drummers, two
trumpeters, several dancers drawn from the many listeners
and any number of people with precussion instruments.
People came from Harlem and, responding to
the call, from New Jersey, Queens, Brooklyn and who knows
where else. Young and old (one man shared with me that he
was 81) they stood, or sat, and enjoyed, or joined
in, the music. Seven thirty, the time events
had been interrupted last week, came and went without
event. At nine o'clock, the drumming stopped, the
estimated one hundred participants and attendees left the
park quietly. It remains to be seen if last night
represents a solution or a temporary respite due to the
holiday weekend. What was clear, from the number of
people who came specifically to support the drummers, is
that the community won't stand for new comers
assuming control over community institutions!
My own opinion, that brought me, from the African Arts
Festival outside my window here in Brooklyn, up to Harlem
to support the drummers, was a deeply felt resentment
against the assumptions of the new arrivals to our
communities - in Harlem, in Brooklyn, in all of our
communities that newcomers have decided to try to claim
for themselves - that they have, by right of arrival, the
right to suppress our community institutions.
Nobody asked them to move in! The cultural fabric that
they find when they arrive, would be well for them to
accept, to learn to accommodate to. We still live
here, it has been, and will continue to be, OUR
community. Confrontation is certainly not the path
to harmony. We are not Lanape Algonquins, they are not
the Dutch and this is not the seventeenth century! We
will not be pushed out of our own communities in the
interests of European expansion! The forces of
capitalism may be supporting their arrival, the forces of
culture and the power of the community will support our
survival!
This isn't, I suspect, over, and I hope we see a whole
lot of folks up there next week - and for all the weeks
it takes to deliver the message that it is our park, our
tradition, our institution, and that we will, with
respect and firmness, protect our prerogatives.
Note to the newcommers - you paid for your apartment, not
our community, our culture or our institutions. These are
still ours and we will both indulge and protect what is
ours. You will just have to learn to play well with
others. You don't own the playground. We, however, do.
It occurs to me - since the complainers live just
doors from a convent of nuns who have not expressed any
concern about the 9:00 closing time for the past 30
years , what makes last weeks complainers so high,
mighty and holy? I know. I'm p.o.'d and venting! I
need to go eat breakfast and take the taste of their
disrespect out of my mouth! Come on out to the African
Arts Festival today - and see y'all in Marcus Garvey Park
next week! If you see me, holla! "Power
concedes nothing without a demand" -Fredrick
Douglass
[TheBlackList]
HARLEM: RACE,
CLASS & GENTRIFICATION “Saving the Soul of Black
Businesses in Harlem : Ending the Economic
Siege of Our Community” “Wake up & Smell the
Power of Your Black Dollars”
Connecting
the dots Community
Forum
St. Ambrose Church Saturday,
July 14,
2007
9 West 130th Street
4
PM - 7
PM
(Between Fifth and Lenox Avenues)
Speakers:
Sikhulu Shange (owner of
the Record Shack for past 35 years), Minister Kevin
Mahammad (Mosque #7), Rev. James David Manning (ATLAH
Ministries), Harlem Filmmaker Duana Butler, Maurice
Powell ( 125th St.
Vendors), Representatives from the 116th
Vendors, Nellie Bailey ( Harlem Tenants Council), and
others!! Special Report: Marcus Garvey
Park Drummers Will not Be Silenced! The so called
“revitalization” of Harlem is taking place with
the ethnic cleansing of local Black businesses. Major
corporate chains are moving in while local Black
businesses are being forced out, incredibly with funds
from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ) that
subsidized $11.2 million in loans to Harlem USA that also
received funds from Chase Manhattan Bank and the Empire
State Development Corp. This is nothing more than
“economic racism”!! Join us in this powerful
community discussion on how to take back the local Black
economic life of Harlem. Light Refreshments Served
Sponsors: Harlem Tenants
Council (HTC at 212-234-5005 or email: harlemtenants@aol.com)
and Harlem Committee To Protect Black
Businesses ( 212-866-1600)
or email:saredi@aol.com. Directions: 2 or 3 Train to 125th
or 135th Street .[TheBlackList] Harlem Forum on
Gentrification and survival of Black Businesses
Ironic By John Burl Smith from "The Dish" Internet Magazine
www.thedish.org
The term irony indicates incongruity between what might be expected and what actually exists or contrasts between apparent and intended meaning or consequences. Truth and reality, good intentions but bad results, even good results from bad intentions are all instances of irony. Another example is the United States (US) is a Christian nation, where people believe "all men are created equal," yet, it was founded on the institution of slavery. Thus, considering US slave descendants and their present dilemma, irony describes their situation perfectly. Knowledge and the acquisition of it have always been major forces behind slaves and their descendants' drive to become a people. Since kidnaping free Africans and forcing them into bondage approximately 400 years ago, keeping them ignorant has been a major goal of whites in the US. Attainment of knowledge by slaves has been dictated by the need to accomplish limited tasks through labor or scarcity in white manpower. Any knowledge beyond that gained by slaves was their creation or manufacture. Once out of forced bondage, slaves and their descendants faced knowledge, socioeconomic and political gaps relative to whites. Almost immediately following the Civil War and the Reconstruction period, whites began using their knowledge, socioeconomic and political advantages to force slave descendants into economic slavery. Ironically, in less than twenty years after emancipation, federal, state and local governments augmented by lynch law enforced by the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow segregation had forced blacks into a situation worse than slavery, because terror became the white man's instrument of control. Terrorism suborned by government created a hostile environment so lethal to slave descendants that lynching drew crowds as large as a hundred thousand white men, woman and children to what were called "picnics." This extra-legal system remained intact until the late 1960s. Segregation and its hostile environment maintained the knowledge, socioeconomic and political advantages whites had over slaves in 1865, and the irony is that in 1965 conditions were relatively the same for their descendants. There is no measure of conditions, legal statue or social practice that was implemented by the US government to reverse this situation, let alone make up for the 218 years of discrimination, disparate treatment, racism and hostile environmental conditions slave descendants have endured. Ironically, in their ability to do for themselves, minus lynching, slave descendants fared better during segregation than during the subsequent period of so-called integration. This was not because of segregation but because of the indomitable will of slave descendants not only to survive but improve as a people. Over the course of that 218 years of terror and deprivation, blacks have beat the odds and defeated efforts to deny them opportunities to demonstrate their phenomenal abilities. Slave descendants were so successful, whites built the US economy on their backs by plotting and taking over everything slavery's descendants built or created.