Revealing moments in black history, with unpublished photos from The New York Times’s archives. We’ve added images daily in February. Read the introduction. Give us feedback.
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“Princeton’s two elementary schools were integrated 16 years ago,” reported The Times on June 21, 1964. “Thus began a three-act racial drama — first, a period of Negro hopes; next, Negro frustration and disillusionment; and then, a limited degree of fulfillment.”
An article in The Times Magazine — with a picture showing high school students in Princeton, N.J., between classes — assessed the school system’s progress in integration, which was trumpeted as a model for struggling integration efforts in schools across the country. It also offered a caveat that still resonates, noting that in the search for a thriving and equal community, “good schooling is not enough.”
UPDATE: Many readers have asked about the children in this photo. All we know from our archives is that they were second graders at Princeton’s Nassau Street Elementary School. Do you know them or how to find them? Let us know. We’d like to find them, too.
The front and back of the well-known photograph of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Allyn Baum/The New York Times
Hundreds of stunning images from black history, drawn from old negatives, have long been buried in the musty envelopes and crowded bins of the New York Times archives.
None of them was published by The Times until now.
Were the photos — or the people in them — not deemed newsworthy enough? Did the images not arrive in time for publication? Were they pushed aside by words here at an institution long known as the Gray Lady?
As you scroll through the images, each will take you back: To the charred wreckage of Malcolm X’s house in Queens, just hours after it was bombed. To the Lincoln Memorial, where thousands of African-American protesters gathered, six years before the March on Washington. To Lena Horne’s elegant penthouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. To a city sidewalk where schoolgirls jumped rope, while the writer Zora Neale Hurston cheered them on, behind the scenes.
Photographers for The Times captured all of these scenes, but then the pictures and negatives were filed in our archives, where they sat for decades.
This month, we present a robust selection for the very first time.
Every day during Black History Month, we will publish at least one of these photographs online, illuminating stories that were never told in our pages and others that have been mostly forgotten.
Among them are images of confrontations between the police and demonstrators, including a rally that erupted in violence after the assassination of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader.
There are pioneers in Hollywood and hip-hop and in the ballpark, as well as ordinary people savoring daily life. And there are prominent figures, such as James Baldwin and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in photographs with stories of their own.
Consider the close-up of Dr. King above. It is the only photo in this project that has been previously published; it has appeared many times over the past 50 years, as the backside of the print clearly shows, and it looks as if it might have been taken during a formal sitting.
But it was shot during the summer of 1963 on a day when black protesters hurled eggs at Dr. King as he arrived at a church in Harlem. Earlier that day, he criticized black nationalists, saying that those who called for a separate black state were “wrong.” Some believed that those remarks inspired the attack that night.
Our photographer snapped Dr. King’s picture as he participated in a round table that was broadcast on NBC. The photo below, unpublished until now, captured that discussion. (Click on the image for a larger view, and to scroll through the other photos.)
Sometime later, an editor cropped one of those images from the NBC appearance to create the head shot of Dr. King that is now so familiar and so disconnected from the tumultuous events of that day.
Many of these photographs, and their stories, are equally intriguing. But the collection is far from comprehensive. There are gaps, for many reasons.
We had a small staff of photographers — the first was hired sometime after 1910 — and nearly all of them were based in New York City. As a result, most staff photographs depicted events in New York and places nearby, though The Times also bought pictures from freelancers and studios in other parts of the country and overseas. (The Times’s picture agency, Wide World News Photo Service, which had staff members in London, Berlin and elsewhere, was sold to The Associated Press in 1941.)
More than now, we also put a premium back then on words, not pictures, which meant that many photographs that were taken were never published.
But other holes in coverage probably reflect the biases of some earlier editors at our news organization, long known as the newspaper of record. They and they alone determined who was newsworthy and who was not, at a time when black people were marginalized in society and in the media.
In our archive of roughly five million prints, after weeks of searching, we could not find a single staff photograph of W.E.B. Du Bois; of Romare Bearden, one of the country’s pre-eminent artists; or of Richard Wright, the influential author of “Native Son” and “Black Boy.” (The Times did publish a handful of photographs of these men taken by freelancers, friends or private studios.)
Our archive is vast — and the filing was sometimes idiosyncratic — so some of these images may still be unearthed. But as we unveil this trove of rediscovered photographs, keep in mind how much we are missing.
— Rachel L. Swarns
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She was one of the most famous performers in the country, a recording star, a Hollywood actress and a nightclub sensation.
But in the late 1950s, Lena Horne still struggled to find property owners in Manhattan who were willing to sell co-ops or condominiums to African-Americans, even very wealthy ones.
So how exactly did she snare the penthouse apartment, featured in this photograph, at 300 West End Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? With the help of a good friend, Harry Belafonte.
Back in 1958, Mr. Belafonte, who was the first recording artist to sell more than a million LPs, was turned away from one Manhattan apartment after another. And he was furious. So he sent his publicist, who was white, to rent a four-bedroom apartment in the building at 300 West End Avenue. His publicist passed on the paperwork, and Mr. Belafonte signed the one-year lease in his own name.
Within hours of moving in, Mr. Belafonte said, the building’s manager “became aware that he had a Negro as a tenant.” The building’s owner asked him to leave. Mr. Belafonte refused.
Instead, he bought the building, using dummy real estate companies to cloak his identity. Some tenants who had been renting there bought their apartments and some of Mr. Belafonte’s friends moved in, too. “Lena Horne got the penthouse,” said Mr. Belafonte, who described the real estate deal in his memoir, “My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race and Defiance.”
By Dec. 17, 1964, when this photograph was taken by our photographer, Sam Falk, Ms. Horne and her husband, Lennie Hayton, a white composer and conductor, were comfortably settled in. She was hanging Christmas decorations that day as she prepared for the debut of her television show, “Lena.”
In the article that ran 10 days later, accompanied by a different photograph, a close-up, she mentioned her difficulties in finding an apartment, but not the back story to where she had landed.
“Lennie and I lived in hotels for years while we were on the road,” said Ms. Horne, who was 47 then. “And then we went through the hysteria of trying to find an apartment – all those stupid problems – and when we finally found a place that would admit both me and Lennie, we put our roots down.”
— Rachel L. Swarns
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Thousands came, from 30 states, to the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on May 17, 1957. They wanted more, and faster, action on civil rights issues and to look back and forward on the third anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.
In a speech to the crowd that day, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described that landmark Supreme Court decision as “a joyous daybreak to end the long night of enforced segregation.”
But even then, it was clear that segregation in schools would outlast its historic defeat in the courts, in part because efforts to put the ruling in effect were weak or nonexistent.
“The Supreme Court’s decision is not self-enforcing,” said an article in The New York Times Magazine a few weeks after the pilgrimage, “and instead of spelling the end of an era of civil-rights litigation, it has marked the beginning of a new and even more bitter phase.”
The photograph above seemed to capture perfectly the mood of the time: No one in the picture looks satisfied or triumphant. But our article that day relied only on words. No photographs were included.
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Malcolm X was sleeping when firebombs crashed through his living room windows shortly before 3 in the morning. Jolted awake by the explosions, he rushed his wife and four young daughters out into the cold before fire engulfed their modest brick house in East Elmhurst, Queens.
We published an article about the attack on Feb. 15, 1965, and paired it with a photograph taken by a news agency that captured Malcolm X stepping out of his car, in front of his house. What our readers did not know was that one of our own photographers, Don Hogan Charles, had walked through the house, shooting powerful pictures of the damage.
This stark image of the shattered windows, singed walls and sooty debris, shown here for the first time, offers a glimpse of the private life of a man who spent much of his time in the public eye. Malcolm X gave speeches in Manhattan, Detroit and other cities around the country and overseas. But he came home to Queens.
The two-bedroom house at 23-11 97th Street, which was owned by the Nation of Islam, had a small living room, a dining room, a bathroom, a kitchen and a former utility room, where Malcolm X’s 5-month-old daughter slept in a crib. Few of the family’s possessions survived the blaze. Malcolm X, who told our reporter that he had been receiving daily threats, escaped that firebombing unscathed. He was assassinated one week later.
— Rachel L. Swarns
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The shorts and kneepads scream 1965. But who is that lanky seven-foot-tall, 17-year-old high school athlete standing with teammates from Power Memorial Academy at the Catholic High School Athletic Association Championship game?
College recruiters were pursuing the center with intensity, harassing him in the street and searching for his unlisted phone number. The athlete, Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr., was a giant, an epic talent. But he eschewed the spotlight. He referred each scout to his coach.
“I want two things from college,” Alcindor said. “I want to be treated like Lew Alcindor. I want an education.”
Eventually he settled on U.C.L.A., then a career in the N.B.A., starting with the Milwaukee Bucks. He led the Bucks to a championship in 1971, and the day after that victory, he changed his name to one we are a bit more familiar with: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
— Matt McCann and Damien Cave
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Chester Higgins Jr. spent 40 years as a staff photographer for The Times before retiring in 2014. Writing from Ethiopia, he described covering Run-DMC at Madison Square Garden in 1986 for a benefit concert against crack cocaine. We never published photographs from the show or wrote about the performance.
Arriving to photograph this new group Run-DMC, I had mixed feelings. The music was slamming. The wordplay structure was mesmerizing, delivered as a diatribe that delineated the injustices experienced by this generation of young black people living in a society that held them in contempt. It resonated as a cry for justice giving voice to frustrations. The music’s relentless tempo, driving earnestness and poetic structure had become a new creation with its own energy that spoke to these young people, but I found some of the lyrics horrifying, especially the use of the word “nigger.”
Growing up in the South, I felt the sting of this derogatory word; to embrace it in a song smacked of self-hate.
But at the same time, it was clear these entertainers connected with the youth of their generation. The audience loved them, and I realized how powerful and totally off the radar the new music called rap had become.
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“Princeton’s two elementary schools were integrated 16 years ago,” reported The Times on June 21, 1964. “Thus began a three-act racial drama — first, a period of Negro hopes; next, Negro frustration and disillusionment; and then, a limited degree of fulfillment.”
An article in The Times Magazine — with a picture showing high school students in Princeton, N.J., between classes — assessed the school system’s progress in integration, which was trumpeted as a model for struggling integration efforts in schools across the country. It also offered a caveat that still resonates, noting that in the search for a thriving and equal community, “good schooling is not enough.”
UPDATE: Many readers have asked about the children in this photo. All we know from our archives is that they were second graders at Princeton’s Nassau Street Elementary School. Do you know them or how to find them? Let us know. We’d like to find them, too.
In January 1967, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Democrat of Harlem, was prevented from taking his seat in Congress. The House had voted to keep him out while he was being investigated by the Judiciary Committee for a number of scandals, but among some of his constituents, there was a sense that he was being unfairly singled out.
“He was just too powerful for a Negro,” one supporter said. “Keep the faith, baby,” said another — and he did. He took his fight to the Supreme Court, and in 1969 he prevailed in Powell v. McCormack, in which the justices ruled that Representative Powell, being duly elected by the people, could not be voted out of his seat by members of the House.
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It was New York City’s first Afro-American Day parade, a moment of pride and solidarity, much needed in September 1969, after years of struggle and strife.
“A parade is not an end; it’s just a mechanism,” said Livingston L. Wingate of the United Federation of Black Community Organizations, which formed that year to address various concerns. “It is an attempt to utilize our numerical organizational strength,” he added. “I call it a massive computer system, programmed by the people of Harlem.”
Borough President Percy E. Sutton of Manhattan had renamed Seventh Avenue “the Avenue of the Africans” for the event, and our article the next day included a photo of a gathered crowd. This quieter but compelling image did not make the cut.
Do you recognize anyone in the photo? If you do, or if you recall that day, or any other moment captured in these images, please let us know by commenting here in our feedback form or in the post below.
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It was 1949, the year Jackie Robinson would bat .342 for the Brooklyn Dodgers and receive the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award, just 31 months after becoming the first player to break the color barrier.
But on Feb. 14, before the season started, before the crowds poured into Ebbets Field, Mr. Robinson spoke to the Sociology Society at City College in New York.
We’re trying to figure out why.
This photograph, unpublished until now, documents the moment, with the students leaning forward to hear him speak. But what was he discussing? The photo caption offers only a hint, saying that Mr. Robinson was speaking about “his work with Harlem boys’ groups.”
We know that Mr. Robinson coached children at the YMCA in Harlem a year earlier, to help, as he put it, “keep them off the streets.” And it is easy to imagine how his successes and struggles would have resonated with African-American boys and teenagers at a time when racial discrimination was rife. “I had to fight hard against loneliness, abuse and the knowledge that any mistake I made would be magnified because I was the only black man out there,” Mr. Robinson wrote in his memoir, “I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson,” describing those early years with the Dodgers.
But The New York Times didn’t publish an article about the ballplayer’s visit to City College that day. So we turned to you for help.
Here’s what we’ve learned so far, in the first few hours.
Several readers (from Brooklyn, San Francisco and elsewhere) pointed us to City College’s undergraduate newspaper, “The Campus,“ which published an article about Mr. Robinson’s speech to students on Feb. 18, 1949.
The article said that Mr. Robinson had spent five months, during his off-season, working with underprivileged children at the YMCA in Harlem. “I’ve learned more from the kids than they’ve learned from me,” said Mr. Robinson, who described his work to members of the Sociology Society, adding that it had given him “great satisfaction.”
We’re also still following up with readers who think they may recognize someone from the photo.
Finally, one astute reader, Tzvi Waxman, a ninth grader from Philadelphia – and a self-described “lover of everything baseball” – pointed out that Mr. Robinson was preceded by a small number of African-Americans who played professionally, mostly in the minor leagues. That was in the 1880s, until team owners prohibited the signing of any new African-American athletes in 1887, segregating baseball, and creating the color barrier that Mr. Robinson overcame.
Tzvi is right, and we’ve clarified the post above to reflect that detail.
Still, we’d like to know more. Were you there that day, listening to his speech? Do you recognize a face in the crowd of students? Or were you one of the young people coached by Mr. Robinson back then?
Comments on this post are now closed. For a more complete answer to the questions posed here, come meet the man who made the Robinson visit happen.
— Rachel L. Swarns
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Thurgood Marshall was a lawyer of heroic imagination, who led the team that brought school desegregation to the Supreme Court, winning an end to separate but equal. In 1967, he became the country’s first black Supreme Court justice.
But five years before that, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 1962, he made his way to St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church in Harlem, where he was a vestryman, and bowed his head to receive the St. Philip’s Rector’s Award from the Rev. Dr. M. Moran Weston.
To outsiders perhaps, it was a minor accolade for Mr. Marshall, then a federal appeals court judge. It went unmentioned in Justice Marshall’s lengthy Times obituary. But the quiet humility he displays here in a photograph (never published until now) reveals just how much his faith, and church, provided him with spiritual strength.
Our article the next day only hinted at that. We ran a photograph of the judge behind the pulpit and wrote that he had urged his neighbors to “make Harlem the kind of place that people will want to come to.” We went on to quote him telling them: “We can complain, we should complain, and we shall continue to complain. But we must feel the responsibility first ourselves.”
It was a strong message. By a strong man. Showing the judge in eyes-closed, pious prayer probably didn’t fit with the coverage. Now, though, the photograph conjures up another message, delivered by President Obama last year after the church shootings in Charleston, S.C., when he described the deeper meaning of the black church in American life. Over centuries, black churches have been “our beating heart,” he said. “The place where our dignity as a people is inviolate.”
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The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson was only 27 on Sept. 22, 1969, when he led a rally of 4,000 people in Chicago, calling for an end to discrimination in the construction trades. In an interview, which has been condensed, he described what he remembered from that day.
We wanted to demand that if they were going to build where we live, we should have the trade skills to build. If there were public contracts, we should have the right to have a part of those contracts.
The police were there to protect them from us; we should have been protected from them.
We were just fighting regular racial segregation, except it was segregation in the unions – as it was in the schools, as it was in the police and fire departments. It was as hostile as anything we faced in the South, maybe even more so.
As for me, well, I’m still here. My fire for justice and inclusiveness is as strong now as it was then. Today it is facing those police in Ferguson, those police who still think they have the right to kill us; or in Flint, it’s the right to poison the water. We’re still fighting these barriers to equality and justice.
It’s not understood. The same people who call us lazy lock us out of trade unions. We’ve had to fight to get the right to skills to work. Many young men are hopeless and jobless — they don’t have the same trade skills their white counterparts had.
In the fight to rebuild where we live, there are countless jobs. There are probably more jobs than people. People ask how can you police poverty. You can’t police poverty. But you can develop people where you live so there’s less need for police.
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He is pensive. Quizzical. Amused. Then, suddenly, there’s that wide grin, that light-up-your-face laugh. That single shot of James Baldwin — Frame 19, above — landed on the culture pages of The New York Times in 1972.
But our photographer Jack Manning took many, many more pictures that day. After more than four decades, we are finally publishing some of the most interesting outtakes.
The sheet above includes 23 frames of Mr. Baldwin in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as the writer and expatriate spent some time in New York on his way home to France after a fund-raising trip for the activist Angela Davis.
Mr. Baldwin was discussing his new collection of essays, “No Name in the Street”; his disillusionment with the civil rights movement; his writer’s block; and the illness that kept him bedridden for months with what he said his “friends thought was hepatitis, but with something I thought was psychological.”
The wide-ranging interview appeared in an article published on June 26, 1972.
But what captures us today in these close-ups is his face, the wide eyes, the lined forehead, the mouth frozen midsentence, the cigarette caught between his fingers, the evocative expressions that shift from frame to frame.
For years, Mr. Baldwin felt uncomfortable with his looks. His stepfather made fun of him when he was growing up, ridiculing his “frog eyes” and calling him the ugliest boy he had ever seen. Mr. Baldwin internalized that view of himself: “I had absolutely no reason to doubt him,” he wrote in 1976 in his book-length essay, “The Devil Finds Work.”
“This judgment,” Mr. Baldwin continued, “was to have a decidedly terrifying effect on my life.”
Over time, he learned that not everyone shared that view. Mr. Baldwin electrified readers in the 1950s and ’60s with a searing series of books and essays on race in America, including “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Notes of a Native Son,” “Nobody Knows My Name” and “The Fire Next Time.” People knew him not as the man with “frog eyes,” but as a writer of passion and power.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor, was 14 when he came across “Notes of a Native Son.” It was the first time he had ever read a book by a black writer, “the first time I had heard a voice capturing the terrible exhilaration and anxiety of being a person of African descent in this country,” Dr. Gates wrote in an article about Mr. Baldwin’s legacy for The New Republic.
Dr. Gates finally met Mr. Baldwin at his home in France in 1973, just a year or so after Mr. Manning shot these photographs for The Times.
“People said Baldwin was ugly; he himself said so,” Dr. Gates wrote in 1992. “But he was not ugly to me. There are faces that we cannot see simply as faces because they are so familiar, so iconic, and his face was one of them.”
— Rachel L. Swarns
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It is the oldest photograph in our series: a sidewalk scene in Harlem from 1946. A girl skips rope amid a crowd of children on a lazy summer afternoon. But what is most striking is the woman who was not captured by the camera’s lens.
That woman was Zora Neale Hurston, the novelist and folklorist known as the Queen of the Harlem Renaissance, and she was helping to organize outdoor activities for the children. She had joined forces with a group of women who were trying to combat juvenile delinquency in the community, showing the world that black people were willing and able “to do things for themselves,” she said.
This was nine years after Ms. Hurston published her masterwork, the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and nearly 14 years before she would die in poverty and obscurity.
In 1946, Ms. Hurston was still well known, notable enough that The New York Times wrote about her efforts in Harlem. She had been criticized by some of her contemporaries, who said she caricatured blacks with works that focused on folk culture and the lives of rural people instead of on racial discrimination and social protest.
But Ms. Hurston dismissed those critics as a “sobbing school of Negrohood” and urged them to reconsider their rejection of rural African-American culture. “Who knows,” she wrote, “what fabulous cities of artistic concept lie within the mind and language of some humble Negro boy or girl who has never heard of Ibsen?”
Maybe that’s what drew her to work with underprivileged children. Ms. Hurston certainly knew a bit about hard times. Her mother died when she was young, and after that, she said, she was “passed around the family like a bad penny.”
This photograph never appeared in the newspaper; it was shot for an article about the program in Harlem and Ms. Hurston that ran on Page 14 without an image. But in the faces of those children, Ms. Hurston may well have seen something of herself.
— Rachel L. Swarns
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In July 1967, Newark erupted with violence after rumors circulated that a black cabdriver had been beaten and killed by white police officers. He was actually alive — arrested and injured — but for many black residents, it was just another example of Newark’s systemic problems with police abuse, racism, and corruption.
After six days of unrest, 23 people were dead; 725 were injured.
We described the clashes between the National Guard and black residents with the language of war. One of the front-page headlines on July 15 read, “Negroes Battle With Guardsmen.” Another declared, “Sniper Slays Policeman.”
The main photo published that day showed National Guardsmen and police officers standing over black men face down on the ground, with a caption that said the authorities were “searching for weapons and stolen merchandise.”
The photo that was not published, above, shows a calmer scene that points to the wider trauma experienced by Newarkers who were not involved in the violence, but who watched their city burn and their neighbors bleed.
“Were the disturbances in Newark and other towns riots?” asked Clement A. Price, a historian and revered scholar of Newark, now deceased, in a 2007 essay. “Were they rebellions? Were they civil disorders?”
The questions linger. Robert Curvin, the civil rights leader in Newark who later worked for The New York Times and the Ford Foundation, told me in 2006 that he was still haunted by the experience of trying to keep the city calm, to no avail.
“Talking about it is one of the most traumatic and painful things in my life,” said Mr. Curvin, who died last year. “The destruction of human life that I saw in those very short few days, I will never get over.”
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Our photo quiz has finished; answers can be found above.
Photo editing is always more art than science, and the text and importance of an article often shape the decisions about what is published. Often, that makes sense. Sometimes that means great photos like this one remain hidden for decades.
But today, rather than tell you why we love this previously unpublished photo, we’re asking, “What do you see here?”
The Learning Network, with its weekly feature — What’s Going On in This Picture? — will be asking students of all ages to describe what they see in this photograph, and why it’s of interest.
We would like you to do the same. Tell us who you think is in this photograph, when it was taken and, most important, what you think the story of the image might be, or why it is interesting and compelling.
At the end of the week, we’ll reveal the back story, the photographer and the photograph that ran instead of this one, along with a selection of responses from readers young and old.
The image above comes from a 1967 concert at Madison Square Garden hosted by a group fighting defamation against American Italians; they rejected the term Italian-American because they said they were American first.
That article mentioned Sammy Davis Jr. only in passing. We never published a photograph of the show. But Michelle V. Agins, a Times staff photographer who knew Mr. Davis, recalled that he and the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra, later struggled to get along. At one point, Mr. Sinatra failed to appear for an African-American cause dear to Mr. Davis.
A lightly edited version of our conversation can be found below.
Q. So when you look at this image, what comes to mind?
Well that must have been when they were getting along — he’s in front, leading the Chairman!
The people I know, over at Patsy’s, the restaurant, said they were fighting so bad in the late ’70s that when the Chairman was coming there, Sammy, he’d go in another door because he didn’t want to run into Frank; if one knew the other was there, they’d leave.
At that time he felt like he was a brother to him.
But once when the Chairman was supposed to meet him in Chicago back in ’82 for a fund-raiser to help children of color in the music industry — with instruments and stuff like that — the Chairman didn’t show up. That’s when I met Sammy. He said he was really upset because, he said, “this guy, he’s like my brother, and he’s letting me down.”
That was the quote he used. I remember. He was reserved in his disappointment, but his face spoke.
There was a closeness and kinship for them. When I see that picture, I think of them back then, when they were brothers, when they were boys.
Q. But what happened? Did Sammy play without Frank?
In Chicago, he still did that show by himself.
It was a group founded by Ben Branch — you know, the guy who was with Martin Luther King when he looked down and said, hey, I really want you to play “Precious Lord” — that’s Ben.
Q. That was right before Dr. King was shot and killed. And Sinatra never showed up in Chicago?
Nah, his people kept saying, “Oh he’s coming, he’s coming.” But it didn’t happen.
Q. What was your own rapport with Sammy like?
I used to make fun of him — for being so little. I was friends with his manager.
Q. Did he talk like he sang?
Talking, he had that Rat Pack voice. He was totally a dude. But when he sang, his voice was amazing. It could tumble buildings. All of that came out of him. All of it.
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The Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker served as chief of staff for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from 1960 to 1964 and spent nearly four decades as the pastor of Canaan Baptist Church of Christ, in Harlem. In this photo, from April 5, 1970, he is taking his message to the streets. Although it perfectly captures the urgency of his fight against drug dealers and addiction, our article the next day did not include a photo. We spoke to Dr. Walker, 86, about the unpublished image and the role of the faith community.
I was at the height of my prime, at 116th street in Harlem, and we had a big problem with drug trafficking and our kids. They’d be recruited for drugs, then come to the community centers under the auspices of the church.
That picture was taken when I was talking to the parents of the children.
It was an ongoing movement — some several months. I guess we had a couple hundred people that day. It was after the morning service at the church. I spoke for 30, 45 minutes, not too long because people wanted to get to dinner.
We worked with different faiths, different groups. It was mouth to mouth in the community. We wanted our children to have a choice that was better than drugs.
They were the people I recruited to fight the drug trafficking. It was so rampant.
That’s why Frank Lucas — you remember that movie, “American Gangster”? — put a hit out on me, because I was effectively thwarting the drug traffic.
I had been threatened before. It didn’t bother me. I was convinced that God would take care of me.
The police, I think they were overwhelmed. The 28th Precinct, where our church was situated, was one of the worst drug centers in New York City. You couldn’t buy aspirin, but you could buy any kind of drug.
There was some talk that the police were involved in the drug traffic. I can’t say that myself, but people said the police were being paid by the drug traffickers.
We just felt they weren’t doing anything about it. I guess we felt abandoned. Our children were at risk. That’s why we were so mobilized.
That photo, now, it reminds me of the times that I did things over and beyond what was good sense.
They were always warning me that it was dangerous, but that didn’t stop me. I had been involved in the struggle in the Deep South, so I was accustomed to dangerous situations. It was tough to frighten me because I was so convinced that God would take care of me.
My basic faith was in the Lord. We were doing the right thing at the right time.
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The 21-year-old upstart toppled the tournament’s top-seeded tennis player in a stunning upset on July 30, 1964. We published two photographs of Dennis Ralston, ranked No. 2 in the nation at the time, who walked off the court in defeat. But we didn’t run a single photograph of the winner: a young African-American player named Arthur Ashe, shown here, as he played in the quarterfinals of the Eastern Grass Court Championships in South Orange, N.J.
Ashe would ultimately become the first black man to win Wimbledon and the United States and Australian Opens. On that day in 1964, he was ranked sixth in the nation and had yet to win a national title. Perhaps that was why we didn’t run this photograph. Or perhaps it was because the shots of Ralston were more dramatic, showing him falling to the ground and recovering after missing a return shot. Or perhaps it was hard then for our editors to imagine that the unexpected victory of a promising black player was more than just a lucky break.
Whatever the reason, our photographer, Neal Boenzi, caught Ashe in his element: He is airborne, his arms outstretched, one toe barely touching the ground. After the match, Ashe played down his win, saying that Ralston was tired after playing in several recent tournaments. His opponent thought otherwise. What accounted for Ashe’s victory? “Great shots,” Ralston said.
— Rachel L. Swarns
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The sniper fired his shot from a high-powered rifle, hitting Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader, as he walked from his car to his home after midnight in Jackson, Miss.
Within an hour, he was dead.
It was June 12, 1963, and by that afternoon, as word of the assassination spread, hundreds of black protesters in Jackson started marching — straight into a wall of white police officers.
Many of the marchers carried American flags. The officers carried clubs and automatic rifles.
Claude Sitton snapped this photograph just as the authorities seemed poised to lunge into the peaceful crowd. The officers would strike a girl in the face with a club that afternoon and wrestle a middle-aged woman to the ground as they took 145 people into custody.
Why didn’t Mr. Sitton capture the rough arrests on film?
Perhaps he was too busy taking notes. He was not a photographer. He was a reporter, one of the most prominent chroniclers of the civil rights movement, and his article about Mr. Evers’s death and the protests that followed would land on the front page of The New York Times. (His article, below, published on June 13, 1963, ran with two close-up photos taken by news agencies, one of Mr. Evers and one of his wife, Myrlie Evers.)
By then, Mr. Sitton, the great-grandson of a slave owner, had spent about five years crisscrossing the South as he reported on court cases and demonstrations, church burnings and assassinations. He was so well known that civil rights workers carried his phone number in case they got into trouble.
Later, as national editor of The Times, he instituted a rule that required his staff reporters to cover the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wherever he went. That’s why Earl Caldwell, a Times correspondent, was in Memphis when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968.
Mr. Sitton typically used his words to bring stories to life. But in 1963, he turned to his camera to help capture the racial tensions in Mississippi.
That photograph remained unpublished, until now.
— Rachel L. Swarns
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Earlier this week, we asked readers if they knew what was happening in the photo above, and why it mattered.
More than a thousand of you replied as of Thursday afternoon. Roughly half — more than 500 people — guessed correctly that the man on the left was John V. Lindsay, the mayor of New York City from 1966 to 1973.
A much smaller number of readers correctly identified the black woman on the right: Mahalia Jackson, the Queen of Gospel, who sang at the March on Washington in 1963 and at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.
She was correctly identified only 102 times. Other guesses included Pearl Bailey (74), Aretha Franklin (37), Ella Fitzgerald (23) and Shirley Chisholm (14). Most respondents either didn’t know or simply focused on the white male in the center of the frame, though a few who did identify Ms. Jackson also recognized prejudice in the surrounding details.
“The trailer would be necessary for Ms. Jackson because hotels turned away black people,” wrote Joyce Nadine Burnett from San Diego.
Students of various ages, responding to the photo on The Learning Network blog, which works with educators across the country, inferred that the man in the photo was important because reporters were asking him questions. Their guesses about the interaction between the white man and the black woman ran the gamut.
A student who posted as CJ from Arkansas wrote, “It is clear that the white man is maybe talking about ending segregation, and the black women [sic] is thanking him for it.”
Another student, Natalie from Room 209, wrote, “The man in the suit is probably someone important like the mayor because policeman and the news wouldn’t just be there for the women [sic] in the RV.”
Some students, though, read into the photo with more imagination:
“I think this picture was probably taken like in the 1970s, because in the picture there are black police officers,” wrote a student with the handle Lionlif3. “During segregation white people and black people couldn’t work together or be together, and in the picture there are black and white men, and a black woman. Also, it is a black and white picture. It seems like the white man is probably well known and is also probably got married with the black lady, since there are microphones and old cameras pointing at them, and not all of the racism was over then, so they might be questioning him about it.”
In many of the responses — and this is quite telling in terms of race, gender and perception — the people who wrote in assumed that the woman, Ms. Jackson, was either grateful or submissive to the man, Mayor Lindsay.
In fact, it’s the opposite.
The photo was taken for an article that ran on Page 32 of the paper on July 14, 1969, under the headline “15,000 Attend ‘Gospel Festival’ in Rain in Harlem Park.” At the time, Mayor Lindsay was seeking re-election and struggling, after labor strikes and intense racial tensions that followed the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
He joined Ms. Jackson in her trailer at the event because he was seeking her endorsement. He was the one who needed her.
After the meeting, they left the trailer together, and he was smiling for a good reason. She happily announced to fans and reporters, “We’re really going to go for him.”
The published photo that day, below, was not nearly as interesting. It told us nothing more than the headline.
The unpublished photo, of Ms. Jackson and Mayor Lindsay, showed chemistry. It captured an important moment. There was a story behind the scenes as an opportunistic mayor sought votes with help from a black celebrity.
So why wasn’t it used? That’s hard to answer. Was there discomfort at the time in seeing a black woman with her arms around a white man? Was the intent strictly to promote attendance at the festival and leave out any political or racial message? Or was it simply a case of rushed editing on a tight deadline by a photo editor who had not read the article?
We don’t have answers to those questions. What we do know is this photo has turned out to be both fascinating, and revealing.
— Darcy Eveleigh and Damien Cave
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Three photographs from the paper of July 21, 1973, showed close-up scenes from the Black Rodeo at Freehold Raceway in Freehold, N.J.
A small spread at the bottom of an inside page, without an article, showed children and other spectators watching professional cowboys, many from out West, and men riding bareback on bucking broncos.
This more pastoral photograph, capturing the scale of the rodeo and a less glamorous conclusion to one of the events, went unpublished.
Over the years, The Times did not provide much coverage of the black rodeos that took place in Harlem, either, though we did review a 1972 documentary called “Black Rodeo,” giving it what amounted to a rave in the Times-ian language of the day.
“The tonic effect of ‘Black Rodeo’ is delightful,” we wrote. “Here is a documentary that nimbly records the spills and thrills of a cowboy-animal roundup in two New York stadium performances last year. Best of all, as the candid camera draws happy, pensive comments from the black audiences and the leathery performers, the picture exudes a wonderfully winning pride of race.”
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By 1969, Kenneth B. Clark had appeared in The New York Times many times, but not like this: at ease, with a cigarette between his lips, as he relaxed with his family in the garden outside his comfortable suburban home in Hastings-on-Hudson, a predominantly white community.
Dr. Clark was a prominent psychologist, scholar and educator. His pioneering research on the destructive effects of school segregation was invoked by the United States Supreme Court in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which deemed segregated schools unconstitutional.
He was the first black president of the American Psychological Association, the first African-American to earn a doctorate in psychology at Columbia University, the first to become a tenured instructor in the City College system of New York. As a national authority on integration, Dr. Clark was consulted by mayors, governors and members of Congress. It is no surprise that his photograph appeared in our pages.
But this image, which has never been published until now, reflects a facet of his life that remained unexplored by The Times back then: how he incorporated his public vision of an integrated society into his personal life. In 1950, Dr. Clark moved his family from Manhattan to the predominantly white suburbs in Westchester County, decades before large numbers of African-Americans embarked on their suburban migration.
He did so for the same reason that many white professionals decamped from New York City: He wanted better schools for his children. The segregated schools in Harlem were still failing, he explained, despite his efforts to improve them. “My children have only one life,” he said.
This photograph was intended to accompany an article about “middle-class Negroes in suburbia.” The article never ran. But the picture, taken by Eddie Hausner on Oct. 6, 1969, offers a fascinating glimpse of the noted psychologist, who was 55 at the time. The scene looks idyllic. And in some respects, Dr. Clark’s suburban life was idyllic.
The renowned sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who had a studio in the village, was a friend. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin were houseguests. Visitors described a home filled with books and African art. “A pleasant place, a pleasant suburb,” said Dr. Clark, describing what first drew him to Hastings-on-Hudson.
But there was a flip side. His daughter, Kate Harris, who appears in this photo, later described feeling cut off and out of place among whites in the community who never fully accepted her. She said she was “good enough” to be named president of her class, but not good enough to be invited to the homes of her white friends for dinner.
Dr. Clark never abandoned his faith in the power of integration, despite his disappointment with the slow pace of change. He didn’t give up on his Westchester suburb, either. In 2005, at the age of 90, he died right here, at home.
— Rachel L. Swarns
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On Aug. 8, 1966, The New York Times ran an article that said many Harlem residents wished more white people would visit to see for themselves their community’s reality. The article, by McCandlish Phillips, detailed in an almost anthropological way the Harlem of 1966 to Times readers.
“A curtain of fear, about as forbidding as a wall of brick, has made the black ghetto almost psychologically impenetrable to the white man — at a time when many in the ghetto sense that it needs the white man to help it save itself from a kind of psychological secession from a white society,” Mr. Phillips wrote.
The article went on to note that many “Negroes protest that white people see Harlem in caricature,” but at the same time it stated — citing no authority — that thousands of children had shoes only for Sunday or none at all. Another Times finding was that “a surprising number” of residents preferred the word black to Negro, and some are turning to the study of African history and African dress.”
As part of the usual newspaper process, Don Hogan Charles, then 27 years old, was assigned to take the pictures – to spend a weekend documenting Harlem, where he lived.
Mr. Charles was the first black photographer hired by The Times. And the images he made reveal a Harlem much different from the one portrayed in the text. Four of his photos made it into print with that article, which had probably gone through several levels of editors, and the selected images are strong if somewhat predictable: One shows a scene outside a church; another shows men playing cards on the sidewalk.
But in the hundreds of other photographs that he shot, visible in the negatives of our archives, a fuller portrait of the neighborhood and his neighbors comes into view. The residents of Don Hogan Charles’s Harlem are fully rounded people, not caricatures, symbols or subjects to be studied. He had less than two days to shoot this assignment, but his subjects share a dignity that was often missing from much reporting of the era.
Though The Times was both lauded and vilified for its reporting from the front lines of the civil rights struggles in the South, there were few black journalists in the industry during those years, beyond black news outlets. Major news media coverage of New York’s black neighborhoods often resembled overseas “parachute journalism” — a quick visit, conversations with a few residents on the street, with a little seasoning from outside experts. In the following decades, many newspapers, including The Times, pushed along by lawsuits, added more black, Latino, Asian and female journalists.
Mr. Charles still lives in Harlem, but it is a neighborhood vastly different from the Harlem of the 1960s. Today many white people live in the neighborhood, real estate prices are soaring, and new galleries and restaurants are popping up daily. The area that was once forbidding enough to outsiders to merit a story about its realities is now one that longtime black residents worry about being able to afford.
This post also appears on The Lens Blog, where a full slide show of Mr. Charles’s Harlem outtakes can be found.
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The distinguished American soprano Martina Arroyo, who has just turned 79, sang her last performance at the Metropolitan Opera nearly 30 years ago.
But in this previously unpublished photo of her backstage in 1965, during her run as the formidable heroine, Elizabeth of Valois, in Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” she looks aptly regal and in character, yet a little amazed: a young New York artist on the brink of what became a major Met career.
It started slowly.
Born in Harlem, the daughter of a Puerto Rican father and an African-American mother, Ms. Arroyo made her debut in 1961 in a small role, the Celestial Voice in “Don Carlo.” During the 1961-62 season, she proved a trouper at the company by singing various supporting roles in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, including the Third Norn, Woglinde the Rhinemaiden and Ortlinde the Valkyrie.
After a three-year absence, her Met breakthrough came in February 1965, when she sang her first Aida. That October in “Don Carlo” she stepped way up from the Celestial Voice to Elizabeth of Valois.
Her performances came just 10 years, almost exactly, after Marian Anderson broke the color barrier at the Met in 1955, singing Ulrica in Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera.” In 1961, Leontyne Price, another pioneering black artist, made a high-visibility, high-pressured Met debut as Verdi’s Leonora and quickly became a company star.
Ms. Arroyo had worked her way into the ranks more slowly, drawing less initial attention to her talent, which makes it especially wonderful to see this lovely and historic photo unearthed for all to see.
In all, she would sing some 200 performances at the Met. Today, Ms. Arroyo still contributes to opera by running the Martina Arroyo Foundation, which presents young singers in thoroughly prepared and staged productions of central repertory works. She remains an inspiring role model to emerging artists.
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On June 28, 1971, Joseph A. Colombo Sr., the Brooklyn Mafia boss, was shot in the head and critically wounded at Columbus Circle as an Italian-American civil rights rally was about to begin.
The crowd reacted immediately “with confusion, sorrow, anger, rage and violence directed at Negroes in the crowd, because, as the radio told them and they told each other, Colombo had been shot by a black man,” The Times reported.
The gunman was killed, and our front-page article the next day showed a wounded Mr. Colombo, but the black man in the image above — unpublished until now — was simply a bystander. Librado Romero, a retired Times staff photographer who took the photo, said he lost track of the man and never found out what had happened to him, but he described the scene as a frenzy of “ugly, ugly anger.”
His recollection of that moment, found below, has been condensed and lightly edited.
Bill Sauro is the other photographer from The Times who was there. We were assigned to go up and cover Colombo speaking, so we walked up from Times Square, and we stopped for coffee because we were early. And then when we were approaching the scene at Columbus Circle, we heard the shots ring out.
We rushed up. We were kicking ourselves for not being there when it actually happened. We were very upset about that.
But Bill, by way of a side anecdote, he said, “It’s a good thing we stopped.” He always maintained that it was my suggestion that we stop, and he always used to say that I had saved his life because he knew Colombo, and he said, “I undoubtedly would have been talking to him, and I probably would have gotten shot as well.”
But at any rate, when we got there, I think we photographed the shooter’s corpse being put into an ambulance, or maybe he was still alive.
And then these skirmishes started happening all around us. I think what I did was get up on a lamppost so I could have a better view of everything; I think that’s where that picture was shot from.
I’ve seen it time and time again: when people are at odds, and then their anger rises to the point where they become violent toward one another.
When the Colombo thing happened, in terms of racial tension, it wasn’t at its peak, but it was still around. There was certainly tension — anything could trigger off a riot or a small one.
With Colombo, it all happened very quickly. It was all within 10 to 15 minutes.
There is a part of you that simply wishes it wasn’t happening. However, it’s not your place as a journalist to partake unless someone’s life is being threatened and you could possibly do something about it. That’s the exception. For the most part, you’re just bearing witness: You’re the eyes for the public to be able to realize what’s happened.
With this photo, that guy was alone and surrounded, and what he was trying to say or do, I just don’t know.
I don’t remember what happened after that.
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The wrecking ball had been painted white with red stitches, as if to soften its impact.
It was Feb. 23, 1960, two and a half years after the Brooklyn Dodgers played their last game at Ebbets Field and the big metal ball had been summoned so it could be sent crashing into the ballpark and begin reducing it to rubble.
The Times reported that about 200 people had shown up to watch the demise of the colorful little stadium, which had been the home of the Dodgers for 44 years.
Among those present were several former Dodgers, including Roy Campanella, who had followed close behind Jackie Robinson in breaking down baseball’s color barrier.
Campanella joined the Dodgers in 1948, one year after Robinson made his own major league debut. Over the next decade, Campanella arguably had as much of an impact on the Dodgers’ fortunes as Robinson did. Short, stocky and powerful, he established himself as one of the great catchers in baseball history, being named the most valuable player in the National League three times.
By 1957, he was 35 and on the downside of his career, and he played in only 103 games, the fewest since his rookie season. But one of those games was on Sept. 24, the last one the Dodgers, who were relocating to Los Angeles, would play at Ebbets Field. Campanella started the game and batted twice, and the Dodgers beat Pittsburgh, 2-0, although the victory was as empty as the stands were that night.
Four months later, Campanella’s car skidded and struck a telephone pole while he was driving to his home on Long Island. The accident left him paralyzed from the shoulders down; his career was over.
So it was in a wheelchair, two years later, that he went out onto the field to watch Ebbets Field begin to fall. The Times took a picture of Campanella as he sat alone on the field that day, his No. 39 uniform shirt and his bat propped against his chair.
Behind him were the left-field stands where so many of his home runs had landed. Still visible on the left-field wall were the faded advertisements from the days when Ebbets Field was alive and well: “Luckies Taste Better” read one ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes.
In every sense, the picture captured a memorable era forever gone, but The Times didn’t publish it. Instead, two other pictures were used: one shot from on high inside Ebbets Field, focusing on the assembled crowd, and the other showing Carl Erskine, one of Campanella’s old teammates, as he put his hand on the wrecking ball.
Campanella went on to work for the Los Angeles Dodgers in various roles, and in 1969 he became the second African-American player to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, joining Robinson, who was inducted seven years earlier.
Like Robinson, Campanella played for only one major league team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Like Robinson, he played in only one home park, Ebbets Field. And on Feb. 23, 1960, Campanella was there to say goodbye.
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It is impossible to know what she might have been thinking that March day in 1956 outside the Montgomery County courthouse. The prim woman in the photograph, gripping her handbag with white-gloved hands, wore a neat overcoat and an uneasy expression behind her wire-rimmed eyeglasses.
Was she about to step to the microphones to speak, or had she just stepped away from them? Was she trying to ignore the television cameras capturing her appearance for all to see? Who was the white man trying to guide her along, or the black man with a seemingly supportive hand lightly touching her back?
There was no caption information to identify the woman as Rosa Parks in the unpublished image found in a sack of negatives in our archives, and no mention of the men surrounding her outside the courthouse that day.
It is only in the context of history that the significance of the photo, deeply descriptive without words, comes into sharper focus. Mrs. Parks was at the courthouse for the trial of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was charged with violating an anti-boycott law. The boycott at issue followed her arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a crowded city bus.
That act of civil defiance by Mrs. Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress heading home at the end of her shift in the tailoring department of the Montgomery Fair department store, helped galvanize the yearlong boycott of the city’s bus system. It was a bold decision by a strong yet weary woman — and a spark that ignited the civil rights movement.
At the courthouse that day, though, Mrs. Parks was not the story. It was the account of Dr. King’s trial for an illegal act of civil disobedience — the boycott — that became the focus of our article, which ran without a photo, on Page 20 on March 22, 1956.
The trial was an important moment. It would elevate Dr. King, a 27-year-old charismatic preacher from Georgia, to the iconic leader of the movement.
But as for the woman at the courthouse entrance that day, our first photograph of Mrs. Parks was a news agency picture of her being fingerprinted after her arrest that ran on the front page. Including that image, her picture appeared in our pages only four times in the first 25 years after her arrest.
Eventually, her name and likeness would become a national symbol of courage, and she would be forever known as the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.
In February 2013, on what would have been Mrs. Parks’s 100th birthday, the United States Postal Service provided its own memorable portrait, issuing a commemorative stamp in her honor. That image shows her at roughly the age she was in the photograph above, but with a look of steely determination.
Later that month, Mrs. Parks, who died in 2005 at the age of 92, was immortalized as the first black woman to be honored with a life-size statue in the National Statuary Hall of the Capitol. That sculpture places her on a pedestal, seated as if on a bus, looking straight ahead into the future.
“This morning, we celebrate a seamstress, slight of stature but mighty in courage,” President Obama said at the dedication ceremony. “Rosa Parks held no elected office. She possessed no fortune; lived her life far from the formal seats of power. And yet today, she takes her rightful place among those who’ve shaped this nation’s course.”
Share This Page2016-02-19T07:22:09-05:00 February 19, 2016 7:22 AM ET
What we’re publishing this month represents but a fraction of black history, pulled from our own archives. We would like to see more of what we’re missing, so we’re inviting you to share your own version of Unpublished Black History.
It could be a snapshot from an important event or a quieter personal moment that reveals a deeper truth.
Submit your photos here.
We’ll share a selection at the end of the month.
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Chester Higgins Jr. spent 40 years as a staff photographer for The Times before retiring in 2014. He described the moment in 1989 when David N. Dinkins was just discovering he would win the Democratic nomination, paving the way for him to become New York City’s first black mayor.
In the New York City Democratic mayoral primary race against Ed Koch, David Dinkins was always the underdog. Without the support of the city’s powerful political establishment, Borough President Dinkins of Manhattan ran a steady and flawless campaign by strengthening his weaknesses, reaching out to all constituents and exploiting the missteps of the Koch administration.
Starting from the beginning of the campaign, I put much effort into gaining the trust of the candidate and his staff so as to obtain access to private moments. As a result, I was the only media photographer allowed to witness Mr. Dinkins at the crucial moment when the final primary results were tallied and Mayor Koch conceded.
Having observed that his personal style was more cerebral than emotional, I wasn’t at all surprised to watch his family resonate with the emotion of victory, even as Mr. Dinkins sat calmly in his campaign hotel room on a sofa amid his excited wife, daughter and son and their families.
Seemingly underwhelmed by his victory, Mr. Dinkins showed his characteristic calm, much like deep water.
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Alexander Smalls is now an acclaimed restaurateur in his own right, but when he came to New York to sing opera in 1977, he told us, he found sustenance and comfort at Sylvia’s, the Harlem restaurant and fixture founded by Sylvia Woods in 1962.
For me, it was sort of like going to a big Southern enclave where the people were very much like Southern people I knew in the South.
Sylvia was the queen of all that in Harlem because she came from South Carolina and she created this environment for other Southern people to congregate and carry on. It was like that Sunday dinner after the church service, but it was in Sylvia’s.
We would go up there, and it was a little edgy and sketchy and you kind of clutched yourself a little tighter because clearly the economic scenario there was much different from the Upper West Side or Lincoln Center. But it was also exciting. We were going to have fried chicken and candied yams and mingle and run into folks who made you feel like you were back home, south of the Mason-Dixon line.
That’s what Sylvia’s was like. It was a pilgrimage.
And Sylvia was there. And she greeted you. And seated you and sometimes gave you a hug. When I told her I was from South Carolina, I remember her taking me back in the kitchen, showing me how she made her ribs.
It makes me think of Nina Simone. I was there eating one night, and Nina Simone came in and she and Sylvia had a little tussle, a little argument, because Nina never wanted to pay her bill.
You know Nina was one of those girls, like, “You know who I am?” And Sylvia was like, “Yes, and somebody’s going to pay this bill, Nina, I’m tired of you.”
I’ve been there many times with Cicely Tyson; with Ruby Dee and Ossie. This is the chorus of voices and images and impressions that wraps around me when I go there.
These are people I knew personally, but I was introduced to them as a 20-something-year-old from South Carolina who had come to New York to produce my operatic career, and they were as fascinated with me as I was with them. Baldwin! At Sylvia’s! It was iconic.
And I see that photo and I think of Gordon Parks and Life magazine.
And that’s what comes at me. You hear the roar of history, you know, a flash of civil rights and marches, Sylvia standing out front during a press conference and being revered and being seen as the mother of whatever the movement was, an anchor that anchors this great community. Adam Clayton Powell. That picture conjures up all of that for me.
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You can look at the desolate Bronx streetscape and think one thing about urban decay. Or you can consider the protesters and begin to understand a more complex history.
The photograph above, unpublished until now, appears to have been shot for an article about a program offering two thousand jobs in the city to clean up debris left from the 1977 blackout that set off widespread looting, rioting and arson fires. The jobs paid $30 a day for up to 33 days, The Times reported, but there was a catch: “The applicants must not have been looters themselves.”
The idea that people wanting cleanup jobs after the blackout had to prove they had not participated in looting might have sounded reasonable to some bureaucrat. And the photograph we ran with the article, showing people signing up, did little to dispel the notion that the program inspired anything but interest and appreciation.
But to many long-suffering residents of places like the South Bronx; East Harlem; or Bushwick, Brooklyn, the proposition was downright offensive.
In the Melrose neighborhood of the South Bronx, where arson and abandonment had already devastated the area, residents were facing a city whose financial straits had left them feeling alone. The idea that they had to prove their moral worth for a job was enough to make them take to the streets, a common sight in a decade when people were unwilling to stay quiet and settle for crumbs. This kind of action — loud and on the streets — helped prompt a grass-roots urban renewal movement there and in other neighborhoods where residents refused to wait for basic city services they deserved.
Almost 16 years later, Melrose was being rebuilt with new housing and businesses. As they did in the previous era, officials made their plans without really consulting the people who lived there. Once again, residents protested and demanded a seat at the table. This time, officials welcomed them and made them part of the planning process as they designed homes, gardens and other features that gave Melrose a new start.
Today the neighborhood, while still poorer than other parts of the city, is fighting a different kind of problem — gentrification — and activists have landed on a new slogan in their struggle for self-determination: The Bronx is not for sale.
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Lionel Hampton, the jazz vibraphonist, had a great sense of music as a continuously transforming event: His body of work keeps you on alert in the intensified, energetic moment.
This picture, taken in 1985 by the Times photographer Marilynn K. Yee — but buried in the Times archives until now — perfectly captures Hampton (with drumsticks), midbeat on drums, the instrument of his early career. He had just joined a New Orleans-style parade in New York, celebrating an art opening of jazz-related works at the Dyansen Gallery in SoHo. His smile suggests he’s right at home, thrilled by the spontaneous spectacle.
But the march — which started at Columbus Circle, went east to 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, then restarted in SoHo near the gallery after the musicians took a bus downtown — didn’t quite fit with our article, which previewed “a new and star-studded jazz festival” at South Street Seaport. So instead of this vibrant image with Hampton, who would be playing on the festival’s first night, we ran a portrait of his face.
By that time, he had already come a long, long way. Born in 1908 in Louisville, Ky., he relocated with his mother to Birmingham, Ala., later described by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”
He later moved to Kenosha, Wis., and then to Chicago, and in the early days of his professional career he moved to Los Angeles to play drums in jazz bands, including Les Hite’s. Louis Armstrong used the Hite band on a trip out West and persuaded Hampton to play vibraphone; Hampton went on to become one of the pre-eminent soloists on the instrument.
During the late 1930s, Hampton was also a star in one of the first high-profile racially integrated bands, Benny Goodman’s quartet, alongside Goodman, Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa. Their records from back then remain powerful: impeccable, organized, propulsive.
But there were private challenges. On tour, Hampton wrote, Goodman had to draw up a contract with promoters to ensure that Hampton and Wilson could stay in the same hotels as the rest of the band; he also had to hire people to escort the black musicians from hotel entrances to their rooms, so that — in Hampton’s words — “we wouldn’t be exposed to any unpleasantness.”
And yet here was Hampton making some of the most generous and confident American music of the 20th century. Some of what he did soon afterward, with his own bands, was rhythm and blues prefiguring rock ’n’ roll; “Flying Home,” in 1942, with a driving saxophone solo by Illinois Jacquet, became one of the great commercial breakthroughs made by a jazz musician. Hampton became an ambassador, bringing jazz far afield, and played “Flying Home” at Harry S. Truman’s presidential inauguration in 1949, in a program with Lena Horne and the operatic soprano Dorothy Maynor.
And as Armstrong did for him, Hampton helped elevate other important musicians in their early years, including Dinah Washington and Quincy Jones. He also lifted others in smaller ways, creating music scholarships at universities and helping to build low-income housing.
All that good will reverberated back to him in ways big and small. At the very least, it meant that a band of jazz marchers in 1985 could rely on him for unannounced percussion. It also meant that 17 years later, he would be the one honored by another New Orleans-style parade held in New York, after his death. Wynton Marsalis and the Gully Low Jazz Band led a crowd of mourners and fans toward Riverside Church, where luminaries gathered for his funeral. The speakers included Illinois Jacquet; the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III; Representative Charles B. Rangel; and the elder George Bush.
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By the fall of 1967, Sidney Poitier was in the middle of being the biggest movie star in America. “To Sir, With Love” and “In the Heat of the Night” had opened in the spring and summer. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was scheduled for December.
And in the fall he was shooting a romance with Abbey Lincoln called “For Love of Ivy,” about two obnoxious white kids (Beau Bridges and Lauri Peters) who blackmail a black businessman (Mr. Poitier) to date their housekeeper, Ivy (Ms. Lincoln), so she won’t leave the family to live on her own.
Whatever scene is being photographed here in the image above doesn’t appear in the movie.
The New York Times article that ran without this photo, or any photo, tried to wring some comedy out of hippie wrangling. (It also had to explain to readers that “busted” means arrested.)
The gist of that sequence — Mr. Poitier and Ms. Lincoln cavorting with doped-up scenesters — does make the final cut, only her dress is red and his jacket never comes off.
Nonetheless, his being there at all is a little absurd, since Mr. Poitier’s business here in “For Love of Ivy” is an illegal gambling operation, and he’s set up to be an establishment square. But he’d been in the movies for more than a decade and a half at that point and was playing with his tidy, no-fuss image. The country was just getting to see him slap down racism as Virgil Tibbs in “The Heat of the Night,” which is as close to black radicalism as he’d come at that point.
“Ivy” was a walk on the wildish side.
He makes her eat at a Japanese restaurant where the women dress like geishas and feed him with chopsticks (a little kink). They go to a Manhattan club to see some Dada play that he says has been going on for seven months (it’s just a gang of people lying around as if they’re waiting to get the call to come join the Manson family). Afterward, they dance with those hippies.
That stuff is all pretty embarrassing. But the story was Mr. Poitier’s idea. He wanted to do something with this movie as head-turning as what he was doing with Virgil Tibbs.
Take Ivy’s status as a domestic — or her rejection of it in order to make a life for herself. That feels like a critical metaphor for the history of movies: She tries to leave, and her white employers fear that they won’t know who they are without her, that they won’t be able to function.
Mr. Poitier wanted to show a high-functioning black business world (it was criminal, but it was also classy; I mean, he wore a tuxedo and maintained a fancy white clientele). He wanted to show black romance, too. There’s a long sequence between Mr. Poitier and Ms. Lincoln, the jazz artist who died at 80 in 2010, that culminates with them together in bed.
He was 40 at that point, and he’d never been sexier. He’d actually never even gotten to be sexy in a movie – and certainly not with a black woman. So you look at that photo now and maybe see a pair of American stars just being beautiful together – just! But back then, the idea of these two making love would have been this close to starting a revolution.
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She had already surprised everyone by becoming the first black woman in Congress after an upset victory in 1968. Then Shirley Chisholm signed up for work as a census taker in Brooklyn, where she represented a range of struggling neighborhoods.
It was a thankless task; many of the “enumerators” for the 1970 census quit because so many poor black and Hispanic residents refused to answer questions or even open the door.
Their distrust in government ran deep, The Times reported, with some fearing that giving up their personal information would lead to genocide.
Ms. Chisholm, a daughter of immigrants from Barbados who studied American history with the zeal of a woman determined to shape it, understood such sentiments. She also embodied what was needed to bring those New Yorkers into the fold. It wasn’t pontificating. It wasn’t condescending, or scolding; it required the same charm and resolve she showed first as an educator, then as a politician.
“I do not see myself as a lawmaker, an innovator in the field of legislation,” she wrote in her 1970 autobiography, “Unbought and Unbossed.” “America has the laws and the material resources it takes to insure justice for all its people. What it lacks is the heart, the humanity, the Christian love that it would take.”
Our census article that ran on Aug. 1, 1970, relegated Ms. Chisholm’s role to a footnote, a single line in a lengthy story told from cities across the country.
As a result, this photograph of her looking resolute and formal, with her census bag and buttoned-up dress, was never published.
The distrust she aimed to combat back then in poor minority neighborhoods has not disappeared from the census process. Blacks and Hispanics still tend to be undercounted.
Ms. Chisholm, though, went on to appear in our pages more frequently: when she confronted congressional leaders over various issues; when she ran a long-shot campaign for president in 1972; when she announced her plans in 1977 to marry Arthur Hardwick, whom she met while serving in the New York State Assembly; when she died in 2005 at the age of 80.
But even though she was a groundbreaker who served seven terms in Congress, she never commanded the level of attention that other civil rights leaders from that era did. Perhaps it was because she was a woman; she often said she had faced more discrimination because of her gender than because of her race. Or perhaps she never would have wanted all that celebrity anyway.
“That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free,” she wrote in her autobiography.
Putting it more simply in her later years, she said she did not want to be remembered as the first black woman to be elected to Congress, or to run for president, but rather as a black woman who “dared to be herself.”
