- We have to realize that
the problem begins right here.
We have to elevate
our thinking,
not just the thinking
of a handful.
That won't do it.
But the thinking of 22 million
Black people in this country
must be elevated.
They must be made
to see it as we see it.
They must be made
to think as we think,
and then they'll be ready
to act.
Just like we're ready
to act.
- Ain't 'bout religion
- No, no
- Just born and raised
- I'm loaded up in honor
Rise up mighty dread
Fighting for my honor
Not on an empty threat
You're gonna feel this,
my love ♪
Feel this danger
I am the realest,
my love ♪
So follow me
- Ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh-ahh
Ahh, ahh-ahh-ahh,
ahh-ahh-ahh ♪
Ahh-ahh-ahh, ahh-ahh, ahh
[faint music]
♪
[car radio static]
- The picket demonstrations
in the South
continued to escalate,
and so did the development
of the Nation of Islam,
developing particularly
in Harlem.
[applause]
- And in 1840 when they were
lynching Negroes,
and in 1950 when
they were lynching Negroes,
and then a few weeks ago
in Mississippi
they lynched a n*gro.
[car radio static]
- The Klan is staging a mass
rally and cross burning.
[car radio static]
- n*gro demonstrations
resulted in arrest
led to intensified
demonstrations
and sporadic acts of violence
throughout the city.
- We had this migration
coming
from South Carolina,
Virginia,
North Carolina, and
Georgia into Harlem,
which occurs primarily
because people
had been oppressed
and suppressed
and couldn't even
express themself.
- The '60s were
a moment in time
where Black people
were trying to really solidify
and gain their freedom.
There was all the pain
from not being able to be
who they are,
so that's why Harlem
became such a hub,
because you could
really be yourself.
Harlem had, you know, elements
of real soulful living,
and that's why I really, really
adored Harlem at that time.
[funky music]
- I was in Harlem as much
as I could growing up,
just come down here,
either play basketball
or go to the community center
and hang out,
because the vibrancy,
the lifestyle, the music,
every place the--the energy,
Harlem was where it was at.
♪
Harlem felt like
a continuous block party
in the sense
that there was music
coming from people's
small radios
or coming from
their record players,
which was soul music.
[upbeat music]
♪
That music would be happening,
coming out of those windows
and out of the barber
shops the whole time.
So you had doo-wop guys
that was on the corner
that were k*lling it
with those harmonies.
♪
And they knew not only
what corners to be at
so they could attract
the girls,
they knew what buildings
and what courtyards
to be in that gave them
the best acoustics
for when they were
doing their thing.
[light piano music]
♪
- We had all kinds of music
in Harlem.
We had music
from Gregorian style,
Latin-type music.
- You can get rhythm
and blues, reggae, jazz.
You know,
you can get the gospel,
so all of it was there.
Just take your choice
where you want to hang.
♪
- All of these music
in our community,
they were influenced
by a beautiful,
close-knit neighborhood
of people like Cubans,
West Indians,
or people from the South.
- Kids would be out
playing stickball,
Johnny on the pony.
The girls would be
playing skully, double Dutch.
The old folks would be sitting
on the stoop holding court,
going back and forth
to the stores.
These things became, like,
an ongoing soundtrack for me
as a young man for different
aspects of my life.
- This is Harlem.
This is 145th Street.
These four ladies are going
across the street in the snow,
and I was in the snow
with my Leica,
and I put my camera up,
and just as I was about
to click the shutter,
this one lady turned
and looked at me
and I said, "Boom."
[gentle piano music]
When I got out of the navy,
my wife and I moved to Harlem
from Columbus, Ohio.
We had three small rooms
in the back
of a nine-room apartment
at 150th Street
and Convent Avenue.
♪
I never seen that many
Black people in one place.
Everybody was cool.
Everybody dressed sharp.
Especially on the holidays,
you know?
People in Harlem
were beautiful.
In those days,
if you walked down the street
and you're in the neighborhood
and you're new,
people would ask,
"How you doing?"
They would speak to you,
"Hello. How are you?"
It felt family.
♪
- New York City
is a racial layer cake,
and the bottom layer
is Harlem in Manhattan,
where most of the occupants
live behind the double bars
of poverty and a black skin.
Here the American dream
becomes a nightmare.
♪
- In the press they would talk
about the negative aspects
of Black people.
It was never anything refined,
you know?
It wasn't about
the creative part
or about the beautiful part.
It was always very negative
and very r*cist.
[gloomy music]
And I just got sick and tired
of that--that kind of image.
♪
I wanted to photograph
our people as I knew them.
♪
Only we could show
the beauty of us.
[camera shutter clicks]
[applause]
- Thank you and good evening,
ladies and gentlemen,
and welcome
to the Apollo Theater.
We would like to get right
into the swing of things
by introducing to you
three very talented
young ladies of song
who'd like to come out
and give you their version
of a little thing entitled
"Come and Get These Memories,"
Martha and the Vandellas!
[together] Lover,
you've gone from me ♪
And left behind
so many memories ♪
- Hey, baby.
Here's your friendship ring
I can't wear it no more
Here's your old
love letters ♪
I can't read them anymore
- The best of acts dreamed
of playing at the Apollo.
We had a tour, a Motown Revue,
the very first ever.
Going to New York had been
a big thrill for us anyway,
but to know that we were
gonna play the Apollo?
We'd been told,
"If you can't perform well,
"they'll throw things at you,
"vegetables and beer bottles
and wine bottles,
and everything at you
if you're not good."
- Come and get
your memories lover ♪
- We started out with
"Come and Get These Memories,"
and the audience was with us.
They got up and started dancing
and having a good time,
and it made you just feel good
that you were in Harlem.
- We were in Atlanta.
We had been singing
around town.
They wanted us to come
and perform at the Apollo.
"Say what?
In New York?"
They said, "Yeah."
[funky guitar music]
We were scared to death.
We didn't know
what the Apollo was,
what it looked like,
where we went,
how were we gonna do it.
I had my little
khaki skirt on. [laughs]
It was green.
It was an ugly green too.
[laughs]
We always said a prayer
before we went on the stage.
We were so nervous
that they would not like us.
The song that we were to sing
was "Every Beat of My Heart,"
which was our first recording,
and they really applauded.
We were--we were looking
at each other like,
"They really liked us."
And they liked us so much
that they held us over,
and we ended up doing
almost a month,
and that's how we got started
in New York
at the Apollo Theater.
- I love the Apollo Theater.
My mother took me there
when I was probably about 12.
I think about so many different
forms of artistry
that could be seen
at the Apollo,
not only music
but comedians and dancers,
and so for me it was like
being able to fly
to a different planet.
[upbeat funky music]
It's very difficult
to relax in life.
You know,
they have a thing called PTSD.
I'd grown up with PTSD.
I remember at 15 this white
cop was beating up my brother.
It's that fear
and that kind of
hypervigilant feeling.
That PTSD,
it never goes away.
So at the Apollo I felt cool.
I felt like I could sit
with other Black folks
and listen to music
and hear music
and enjoy it and really laugh
and really be disarmed
and not feel like
I was uptight or worried.
- We brought love.
New York made us feel like
we were theirs.
We felt like we belonged
to Harlem and everybody.
It collects everybody
from all over the world.
That's the stopping point.
That's our port city.
- When we look at that
southern migration
coming north to Harlem,
the primary motivation
for that migration
was segregation,
Ku Klux Klan,
t*rror1st [inaudible],
r*pe, m*rder,
no access to voting,
but when you live under
that kind of suppression
for so long,
whe--you explode
when you get to a freedom.
And that's what
Harlem represented.
- You have people becoming
free artistically
to be able
to express themselves.
They can express
their culture,
and when they do
express that culture,
it's a very rich culture
in the Black community.
You see it with music.
- The 1960s was probably
the closest
to a Harlem renaissance
revival.
- Harlem became
like this Mecca.
- It was just exciting,
especially on the weekends when
the community had gotten paid
and came out to have fun.
- Downtown jazz clubs
closed up, like, at 11:30,
and then you would see all
these famous jazz musicians
from the clubs line up
with their fancy cars,
race up 7th Avenue.
They would hang out
till 3:00 in the morning
and play the music
that was much more creative
than what they had
been doing downtown.
♪
- There was this
extraordinary artist,
came out of Texas,
King Curtis,
who was very popular
in Harlem.
- At first I didn't really
chose a career in music.
I was gonna be an architect,
but it was a hobby,
and I found that I liked it
better than the drawing boards
and what have you.
[jazzy saxophone music]
♪
- In the '60s he made
a revision of an earlier piece
called "Harlem Nocturne."
♪
- The original version
of the song "Harlem Nocturne"
coming from the 1930s
was a little bit
more straightforward,
coming out of the big band,
swing era.
It's a little bit more
up and down
in its rhythmic structure.
The King Curtis version is
a little bit
more passionate,
a little bit more fluid
in its orchestration.
You hear a lot more
kind of delicious vibrato
coming from his instrument.
- It's a romantic song.
It puts you in a certain mood,
and it makes you want to dance
or to make love or whatever,
you know,
just a very seductive
piece of music.
- Fits this moment when people
are gathering in large scale,
are responding to the world
in really dramatic ways,
because the circumstances
necessitated it.
The world was filled with drama
in this moment.
And so to hear
King Curtis' phrasing,
his uses of instrument,
the way
the orchestration fills out
while also taking advantage
of some of the newer
electronic impulses,
like amplification,
in this moment with the guitar,
it's a really telling
innovation
in thinking about
the long genealogies
of Harlem's music.
♪
- I lived on the south side
of Chicago
for the first part of my life.
My family was all musicians.
We're all talking about
coming to New York,
because segregation is still
rather stiff in Chicago.
I left Chicago in 1957
to move to Harlem.
My ambition was to broaden
my musical possibilities
by coming to New York.
[upbeat jazzy music]
Every Tuesday
was a night in Harlem
that you would go out
to a jam session.
There were two or three
very famous clubs in Harlem,
like Wells Chicken
and Waffles.
Well, they gave us
a chance to play,
because they had bands
that would allow strangers
to come and sit in.
- We would learn
the songs,
you know,
from all these bands,
and we would go
to the clubs
and listen to them
and dream that, say,
the alto player
didn't show up,
you know, and they'd say,
"Well, we need an alto
player."
I already knew the book,
so, "I'm here.
I can help you out," you know?
So we all had those dreams,
you know?
- You could see
all the sick cats, man.
They had great jazz bars
and great--it was just--
it was hopping.
- Growing up surrounded
by jazz musicians,
I don't really know
any who were not responding
to the politics.
- You'd have to wait sometimes
for them
to call you up,
you know?
Sometimes you might not
even play.
We want to play something
that nobody--
that will keep other people
off of the bandstand.
We want to play something so
hard that they won't know that,
you know, it was, like,
a cutthroat kind of thing.
- We would hear some
of the older musicians
come by and comment
and give their advice
and encouragement
and so forth,
and people would hear you,
and somebody would say,
"Oh, I need a drummer,"
so you made your contacts and
gradually evolved to the point
where you didn't have time
to go to the sessions anymore.
We listened to the radio.
They had good jazz
radio stations.
[light funky jazz music]
And when you heard a record
that you liked,
that you could go
to Bobby's place
and find those records.
- We would go to Bobby's
Record Shop to buy our 45s.
You could hear music.
If you couldn't afford
the music,
you could just go there,
and he was always blasting
music out of the store.
- Bobby was also
a record producer
with very close relationships
with the Apollo,
made you feel like you
were somebody if you could be
in the shop
and a James Brown came
or a Jackie Wilson came.
- Bobby's Happy House
was a place to see people,
to get great music.
Bobby was just--
loved the community.
So, you know, if you liked
a particular singer,
they'd be like, "Hey,
if you like The Supremes,
you need to check out
Mary Wells,"
and even if you didn't
buy the record,
they'd play that record
for you,
so you get, like,
a music education.
You felt like you were welcome.
- We saw many of the artists
back in the day,
jazz artists,
rhythm and blues artists
that was identifying
their lyrics and their poetry
with the political reality
that was around them.
- There were other musicians
hanging out.
All of this enabled me
to meet other people
and talk to them and get entree
into more valuable places,
where I could play
and learn more.
- Hanging out
in the record store
or hanging out
in front of the record store,
there was one brother,
he was, like,
an original street dancer.
From morning till night
he would be next to
that speaker that was outside
of Bobby Record's House
dancing his butt off,
and it wasn't even
that he was a great dancer,
but when you see somebody else
having such a good time,
you can't help
but to enjoy yourself too,
just watching that person.
- Prior to the 1960s,
this was Jim Crow America,
meaning separate
but equal according to the law,
meaning there
were Black venues,
and there were white venues,
and that carried over
onto the radio airwaves.
There was a concerted effort
to actually keep
white music white
and Black music Black.
- The Black community
generally
originated every dance,
and then it started
being imitated
by the white
community.
- The popularization
of Black dance forms
and their ability to cross
over into white audiences
was a huge thing for the music
industry in particular
in thinking about
how they might begin
to market Black musicians.
- And by '60,
the Black community
was beginning to penetrate
into the music
of the white community.
[upbeat music]
♪
- Come on, baby,
let's do the twist ♪
- Hank Ballard
was the first guy
that did the Twist
before Chubby Checker.
As a matter of fact,
Chubby Checker studied Hank,
took the song,
refined the song
to the white world,
if you will.
- The Twist was the craze
that came
and took over the nation.
Everybody was twi--
my mother twisted, you know?
Everybody did the Twist.
- Black music for Black folks
was a celebration.
It was inspiration,
but also it was a weapon
of insurgency.
It was a way that Black
culture got into
white communities,
especially through white kids,
in a way that was unstoppable,
almost viral.
Eldridge Cleaver, who was
minister of information
in the Black Panther Party,
said that the Twist
was like a guided m*ssile
that launched out of
the Black community
and landed into the hearts
and dare I say the hips
of white kids.
- Did you ever twist?
- Yeah, come on.
Get serious.
Did I ever twist?
I'ma smack you.
[laughter]
- Twist succeeded in the way
that politics,
religion, and law
could never do.
[upbeat jazzy music]
♪
- My father was a musician,
played with George Shearing
for 12 years,
Miles Davis,
Duke Ellington, Count Basie,
a lot of the musicians
of his time.
He grew up in Little Rock,
Arkansas.
They were sharecroppers,
and there was no outlet
in Little Rock, Arkansas
for this little Black boy
who was a virtuoso,
so my grandmother
moved to New York.
[light piano music]
- Black music was making
inroads with white
and international audiences.
Black people were struggling
for basic rights
and decent living conditions.
- The basic problems
of Harlem, of course,
are economic and the fact
that the n*gro people
cannot get jobs
as easily as people who
are white all over New York.
Much of the housing is owned
by absentee landlords
or by banks
or mortgage associations,
and they just simply
take the rent,
let the house run down,
very little of the money
coming back to Harlem.
- And no matter how much money
a n*gro earns,
he cannot purchase a house
unless he has the money to pay
for the entire house.
If he needs a mortgage
to buy the house with,
he must borrow it from a bank,
and banks
will not lend--lend money
for a n*gro to purchase.
- We were pretty much confined
to Harlem.
Very few of us could afford
to move out,
so what made Harlem
so beautiful
is that you had the
Black upper-class,
the Black middle-class,
and the Black lower-class
all in one space,
and I think that's the thing
that made the place
so extraordinary.
- You had doctors and lawyers
and funeral directors,
so you had
a professional class,
but when you looked
at business,
we almost had
no other examples
of wealth accumulation,
except for the numbers runners
and the people
who were dealing drugs.
- My grandpa, he often talked
about the colorful figures
in Harlem,
including the Black gangsters.
So there was a person
called Madame Sinclair
who was a numbers runner
and the queen of numbers,
well-dressed, sharp,
serious crew, no joke,
and Bumpy Johnson worked
as an enforcer
at an early age.
- Bumpy grew up
in South Carolina.
Going into Harlem, at first
Bumpy wants
to be a lawyer,
but these avenues
are not open to him,
so what he starts
to understand
is that the numbers runners,
the drug dealers
in this community,
they're actually being able
to achieve
and touch the American dream.
♪
- Numbers are the system
of lottery.
A lot of people in our family
are successful runners.
That was one of the means
of income.
- The numbers running was such
a big part of the economy.
They were the major
employer of people.
The numbers runners
were able to give out loans
that allowed them
to be able build a business,
to get a home.
- Bumpy Johnson said,
"I wanna have a piece of this,"
and did gain a foothold
in solidifying his power
and his network in Harlem
at that time.
- You can't ignore that Bumpy
Johnson is a drug dealer
and that that caused detriment
into the community.
- The overdose became a plague
in Harlem.
You go into the alleyway,
and in the midst of the trash
and the broken bottles
would be a dead body.
- You walk on the street,
you'd see Bumpy Johnson
was solving people's problems.
He was someone
who you could go to.
- Bumpy loved
the Harlem community.
Bumpy gave back,
helped people with their rent,
scholarships,
medical bills.
- If you needed some protection
from something
you had done wrong,
you'd go to Bumpy Johnson.
It was simple.
You'd never go to the police
or the government.
You went to your own people.
- What you want?
- Give me 500, will you?
- You want 500?
- 309.
- 309.
- 788.
- 788.
- 591.
- 591.
- Bumpy Johnson
and a lot of those guys
that were notorious
in our neighborhoods were,
like, heroes to us.
If we had to make a hustle
and the guy was driving
a brand-new car,
we found out that he had
a means to do that,
we wanted to follow suit.
[upbeat piano music]
♪
- The best things
in life are free ♪
But you can give them
to the birds and bees ♪
I need money
[together]
That's what I want
- Money is about opportunity,
the possibility
for Black folks
to actually sustain themselves
economically in this moment
where segregation
is still very real.
- The lyrics, you know,
"The best things in life
are free,"
but when you're poor
and you see that money
makes the world go round,
and you're living in
the African American community,
what does the American dream
really mean?
♪
- And it was not just about
reaching a middle-class ideal
but was really also about
a certain type of hustle
that Black folks had to
participate in for themselves
and their families,
so it was a song
that resonated.
- Motown came in and just
exploded the music industry.
- That music was infectious
and brilliant,
and it talked
about Black culture
that was more aspirational.
It didn't talk about
the hardships so much
that we were experiencing.
It talked about the way that
they wanted to see the world,
and that had
a huge influence on me.
- Motown had the ability
to connect
with where our heads were at.
- We started a revolution
doing the Motown sound.
- Diana and The Supremes,
they had some
really nice songs,
but they were definitely
not R&B "per se,"
rhythm and blues, got no good,
got no, you know?
[laughs]
The producers started
giving them a little more edge
on what they were singing.
Everything wasn't sweetie,
sweetie, sweetie, you know?
You gotta get
a little funk going.
- When I heard that music
from Motown,
I thought
that wasn't classical.
That wasn't jazz.
That wasn't anything
that I was used to,
and it certainly
wasn't the music
that I was hearing
on the radio.
This was
African American music.
- All I needed
was about $1,000
to start
your own record label.
I turned to our family
savings fund
owned by my parents,
brothers, and sisters, and me.
A loan of $800
was voted for unanimously
but not before they made me
sign an additional note
pledging my future royalties
as security.
- In Detroit we had so many
talented artists
who did not have a platform.
There was no recording
company for them,
so Berry recognized
there was a deficiency there.
[funky guitar music]
He had worked
at Ford Motor Company
on the assembly line.
He took the whole
assembly line production
and superimposed that over
this whole music idea,
this dream that he had.
- I thought Mr. Gordy
was a genius.
He knew about entertainment,
He could tell you a song
that was gonna work.
- When we weren't
in the studio,
we were being trained
to dance,
to sing, music theory.
Every song had
some steps to it, a routine.
We had a Motown look and a
Motown dance and a Motown way.
- They were glamorous.
I loved them,
Diana Ross,
Martha Reeves
and The Vandellas,
The Shirelles.
These were all huge influences
that showed us
that you could
possibly be that.
You could have that.
- The level of fortune
that Berry Gordy made,
for most people in Harlem,
that's almost impossible
to realize.
- I was going
to elementary school,
and I would go
into this Black bookstore.
I saw the picture on the cover
of this paperback book
of this--
what looked to me
like a white man what--
who was a preacher.
He had a minister's collar
in the picture.
And I was a boy preacher
in the Pentecostal Church,
I was interested,
and I picked it up
and found out
it was a Black guy.
I bought the book.
It was 99 cents.
I read about
Adam Clayton Powell,
and I was immediately
enamored by him.
- One leader who has been
in the middle
for the past 19 years
is Harlem's controversial
Democratic congressman
Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
- I read about the work
he'd done in the community
in Harlem as a congressman
and as a pastor of Abyssinian.
He wasn't just preaching about
some otherworldly rewards.
He was talking about
what we need
to be doing on the ground here,
and it excited me.
- What I loved about Adam
is 863 bills in Congress.
That's a lawyer.
That's not only someone
who's preaching,
telling you to find God
and how to turn the other
cheek, as Martin would say.
He was committed
to being a person
who really shouted out loud
and made his presence known
in Washington for change.
- I, Adam Powell, may belong
to a group of people
that some others
may think are inferior,
but I belong to a group
of people that God,
omniscient, omnipresent God,
God of all power says,
"You are my children,
and you're the same
as anyone else,"
and with that kind of faith
in me and courage in me,
I know I'm as good
if not better
than anybody that walks
the halls of Congress.
[cheers and applause]
- His contributions to
civil rights is just bar none.
No one has
made more
contributions
to civil rights,
besides Dr. King,
than Adam Clayton
Powell Jr.
[gentle piano music]
♪
- My friend Ilfenesh Hadera,
how you doing, sis?
- How are you? I'm good.
- Everything okay?
- Yeah, I'm good. How are you?
- Good, doing great.
- I grew up
on Hamilton Terrace.
- Oh, okay.
- People would say,
"Where are you from?"
"Oh, I'm from Harlem."
I always noticed,
even as a kid,
it would be
that kind of wide-eyed
- Yes.
- "Is it safe there?
What's it like?"
It's really different
from anywhere else
in the city
or in the boroughs.
- Yeah, yeah,
absolutely, absolutely,
and, you know,
people recognize that now,
so we get visitors
from all over the world
that are coming to Harlem.
They're learning the culture.
- If I hadn't been cast in
"Godfather of Harlem,"
I thought to myself it would
be time to hang up my hat,
because who could play
Mayme Johnson, Bumpy's wife,
better than me, a woman who's
actually grown up in Harlem?
She was born
in North Carolina,
one of many children,
left poverty
to move up to New York
in search of a better,
bigger, brighter life,
like so many people do,
and she became really involved
in Har-You,
which was
a youth program here,
and started working closely
with Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
[gloomy music]
- There was a time they
wouldn't let Black people
work in the stores.
Adam Clayton Powell Jr,
he boycotted all the stores
on 125th.
He shut them down.
I mean, do you know how
powerful that was to do that?
- Which is mind-boggling to me,
totally--I didn't know
this part of the history of--
- Adam Clayton Powell
shut down the stores
so that Blacks
could work in there,
and that--right here
on 125th Street.
♪
- I love the statue.
Larger than life.
- Oh, absolutely.
- I mean, it's a statue
to match his personality.
- Literally, yes, indeed.
- [laughs]
- Look at some of the things,
employment of the
physically handicapped,
and he created that.
- Increasing federal assistance
for public libraries.
- Public libraries.
- I mean, on and on and on.
- I mean, he did so much
that people
forget that--how powerful
Adam Clayton Powell was.
- I think a lot of people get
hung up
in the kind of controversial
just part
of his personal life,
but that just diminishes all
the incredible work he's done.
He's a man on a mission.
- Oh, yeah.
- You know?
- His famous slogan was,
"Keep the faith, baby."
- Our nation is going
to continue to slide downhill
unless we the people
do something to bring back
to its sensibilities
and its sense of right
and its sense of justice to
the United States of America.
[applause]
♪
- A lot of people in Harlem,
they were out there
in the streets
talking about issues
in the Black communities.
- This is no commoner speaking.
This is an angry
Black man speaking.
[cheers and applause]
- Each corner on 125th Street
and I believe 7th Avenue,
people had stepladders,
maybe 6 feet tall,
and they would be
on those ladders
and shouting and talking
and giving a sense
of what the politics
of the times were.
- There are no such thing
as second-class citizens!
- No, definitely.
- You are a citizen,
or you are a sl*ve.
- That's right.
- That's right.
- That's right.
- Any brother could get up
there and start yelling
and screaming about whatever,
and a lot of people did.
Some of the neighborhood guys
would get up and say,
"I'm sick of
the so and so and so,"
and they said,
"That's right, brother."
You got something to say,
you get on a soapbox.
- You had the Garveyites,
who would be talking
about Africa.
You had Black nationalists,
who were talking about
our conditions
in this country.
- And all of this
was now being
broadcasted on 125th Street.
- The way we got our news
about us
was either through
those ladders or "Jet" magazine
and "Amsterdam News."
- They were our newsmen
from the ghetto,
if you will.
[applause]
- In Harlem, people were
being politicized.
You had both physical
rebellion
and mental rebellion.
- I just moved into Harlem
on a Friday night.
So the next day,
instead of unpacking
and all thing,
a friend and I
decided
we were gonna walk
down Lennox Avenue
and just kind of
look around.
[funky music]
And we get down near
116th Street,
and we saw a crowd gathering.
There was probably
2,000 or 3,000 people,
and the stand
was set up there,
and we said,
"Wait, what's going on?"
and they said,
"Malcolm X is going to speak."
And at that time
I had heard of him,
you know, vaguely,
so we decided,
"Let's see
what he's got to say."
- Who taught you to hate
the texture of your hair?
Who taught you to hate
the color of your skin
to such extent that you bleach
to get like the white man?
- Brother Malcolm was talking
about attacks on the mind.
I was 24 years old.
This was something
I had never heard before.
- Who taught you to hate
the shape of your nose
and the shape of your lips?
Who taught you
to hate yourself
from the top of your head
to the soles of your feet?
Who taught you to hate
your own kind?
Who taught you to hate
the race that you belong to
so much so that you don't want
to be around each other?
- And I'm beginning to think
about growing up
in Tuskegee, Alabama,
going to these segregated
movie theaters.
[applause]
- Ahh-ahh-ahh!
Every Sunday we'd be
in that movie theater.
- As weird voodoo rituals
fan the fires
of barbaric violence.
- Go now.
Bring me the warm heart
of Tarzan.
- We cheered for Tarzan
over the Africans
and laughed at the Africans,
because we thought
they thought that meant
that they were just ignorant,
and we laughed at them.
Those were attacks on our mind.
- You should ask yourself
who taught you to hate
being what God gave you.
[cheers and applause]
- For three hours
I listened to him speak,
and Brother Malcolm,
when he spoke that afternoon,
made me understand
how harmful that had been
to us as a people.
[applause]
And by the time he finished,
I was a Malcolmite.
- The joy of Malcolm
was that he could have
in an audience
college professors,
doctors, musicians,
and sisters
who were housewives,
sisters who worked
for people in their houses,
brothers who were
out of prison,
brothers who were on drugs,
brothers who were workers.
I've never seen anyone appeal
to such a broad audience.
He understood
if you tell people the truth,
then it will appeal
to everyone.
- We need an organization
that's ready
and willing to take action
by any means necessary.
- At that time,
people in Harlem
began sharing this
new political consciousness.
[percussive music]
♪
- There was a place in Harlem
called Michaux's African
Memorial Bookstore.
It was a place
where you could get lost
in knowledge, literally.
There were books
from floor to ceiling.
- That bookstore was
an absolute must,
because we had not been
exposed to any kind
of what they call
Black history
or African American studies.
None of this was available
or had been developed
at that time.
- Mr. Michaux was
representative of people
who loved the community.
That they were making money
was a secondary thing.
Mr. Michaux, he would
give you books to read.
If you had money for one title
and then he recommended
another author,
he might lend you
the other book.
He made the place available
for community meetings.
Poets would read.
It was that cultural
kind of gathering place,
and then if you had something
that you wanted to say,
be it to do a reading
or to do some music
or to have a charged discussion
on the difference
between civil rights movement
and Black nationalism,
that that's the place
that you should be.
- When the struggle
is beginning in the South,
you see this replicated
in Harlem,
because African American people
aren't identifying themselves
by neighborhoods.
They're identifying themselves
as African Americans.
- Folks said,
"No, we not taking a step back.
"We're not ignoring
what's going on.
We gotta speak out against it
and speak truth to power."
- So this whole discussion
of Black power,
what's going on
with the protest movement,
it was happening everywhere.
- The Black and White students
spent the whole summer
getting on buses
so that they could go
into bus stations and eat
at lunch counters
that were segregated
and that their bus
was set on fire.
They were paying a very,
very high price and heavy price
to make this point
to fight for freedom.
I understood
that they were warriors.
- I had already been active
in my local NAACP youth group
doing sit-ins.
There are times that pacifism
is an excellent tactic,
but there was no way in hell
you were gonna get me
to lay down on the floor,
put my hands over
the back of my neck
to protect myself from people
trying to k*ll me
with billy clubs and bats,
because I'd rather
sh**t somebody.
- Martin Luther King
at that time,
with all
due respect,
was not one of
Harlem's favorites.
Harlem, we were Malcolm's
children.
- I was a non-revolutionary,
but I don't think
Black people in Harlem
or in any other community
ever were in total agreement
on how to deal with the issue
of equality
and social justice.
You had different
ideological groups,
and they had
their own kind of strategy.
- This whole business
of integration,
I think we've
looked at it in one way.
- Whether the music is playing
off the politics
or politics
is playing off of music,
when it's a moment
that merges in such a way
that's almost indecipherable,
that you don't separate them.
You see them
as a--in a totality.
You see them
as a combustible whole.
- You perhaps came here
to hear us tell you
to turn the other cheek
to the brutality
of the white man.
I say you came
to the wrong place.
[cheers and applause]
- It wasn't till Malcolm X
that it began to have
national and
international ramifications,
and the more I listened
to him,
the more I found myself
in conflict,
because if you beat
the drums of w*r loudly enough
and you discover that you are
incapable of effectively
making the difference
you thought you could make
because the design of violence
would be quickly snuffed out.
It was very troublesome.
[gentle piano music]
- Harry Belafonte,
he had been a star
from the entertainment world
and an activist.
He was close friends
with Dr. Martin Luther King,
who was fighting
for civil rights peacefully.
- And our aim in this struggle
is not to defeat
or to humiliate the white man
but to win his friendship
and understanding,
and the end is reconciliation
and the creation
of the beloved community.
We are not seeking
to annihilate the opponent
but to convert him,
and this is what we
- Dr. King said,
"We'll ask as many ways
as we can peacefully for you
to do the right thing.
- You are gathered here
this afternoon to hear
the Honorable
Elijah Muhammad's message,
which you knew in advance
was titled
"Separation or Death."
[cheers and applause]
- Malcolm X said
this is not about please
and thank you.
Can't turn the other cheek.
Change would happen
if we forced change.
So there was
those competing narratives
in the same
civil rights movement.
- And, you know, some Black
people were against Malcolm.
"You're telling them
the white man is a dog.
You can't do that."
- And there's a great deal
of difference
between nonresistance to evil
and nonviolent resistance.
- Dr. King, is he our leader?
- Martin Luther King I can't
completely go along with.
You know, he will be
so nonviolent
that it would--
that the white men can sic
the dogs and the ammunition
and blow us all up,
and we'll all die
for--you know,
for this peace and brotherly
love and all of this.
- I have a great deal
of respect,
by the way, for Malcolm X.
I disagree with him
a great deal.
A great deal
of what he's saying is aimed
at the depressed
and the destitute,
and he appeals to them,
but you've got to have
something to offer them,
else they're lost
to us forever.
- Can you see anything
between a Malcolm X
and a Martin Luther King?
- No, because I think
that these two gentlemen
might very well
be the casualties
as a result of this struggle
for equality
because, you see, they took two
dichotomous positions.
This is unnatural.
- From a political point
of view,
the only thing
everyone agreed on
was that
it was time for real change.
- Music became its own
kind of language
by which people could
tell each other stories,
encourage one another, but also
best survive the present tumult
and think about how they could
best move forward.
["It's All Right"
by The Impressions"]
♪
- Say it's all right
It's all right
Say it's all right
It's all right
It's all right
Have a good time
'cause it's all right ♪
Whoa, it's all right
- "It's All Right" makes
you feel like it's all right.
It gives you a feeling
that it's going to be okay.
If you have a higher value
and a higher integrity,
then it really is all right.
Curtis was an entertainer
and realized
that that wasn't enough
because of the oppression
of the people.
He was someone who I think
believed that his work
had to be instrumental in
moving people toward freedom.
He had a certain
kind of courage and poetry
that people
hadn't really heard before,
and that affected black people.
- Feeling sad
like so many of us do ♪
Hum a little soul
Make life your goal
And surely something's
gotta come to you ♪
And say it's all right
- He was trying to make
a comment
on where we were at
in our society right now
and also suggestive
about how to change it.
The music
became the movement,
and it became the guiding force
to be able to get people
starting to move forward.
- Give yourself a chance
You've got soul
And everybody knows
that it's all right ♪
Whoa, it's all right
[frenetic jazz music]
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01x01 - Mecca
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Documentary series examines the story of Harlem, its music during the 1960's and its connections to today.
Documentary series examines the story of Harlem, its music during the 1960's and its connections to today.