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126 4 Gangster’s Paradise Drugs and Crime in Harlem, from Blaxploitation to New Jack Cinema This book is about Harlem. Fabulous, “exotic” Harlem. A city within a city, walled in by the enemy and occupied by enemy forces. . . . [This] is not a story of a people hopelessly lost in a quagmire of despair and helplessness , but the story of the people fighting back against overwhelming odds, which makes it a very special kind of book. —John O. Killens, Harlem Stirs By the time that The Cool World was shown on screens around the world, the assertion that Harlem was a ghetto was familiar to film audiences; the popular press had been broadcasting portraits (still and moving) of inner-city despair, decay, and victimhood since the 1930s. Such images were the product of a number of political, social, economic, and aesthetic factors, including sociological discourses supporting environmental determinism and governmental abandonment of inner-city areas. Film borrowed from ethnographic and experimental filmmaking in an attempt to match aesthetics with such discourses. The result was a new urban realism that shifted away from Hollywood genres and focused, more than in the past, on the impact of city life on young African American men. Films like The Cool World in particular illustrated what was at stake in the city for their young protagonists; many were destined to meet violent ends, whether it be at the hands of another gang member or, just as likely, the result of a run-in with the police. Just such a violent exchange occurred the year following the release of The Cool World and resulted in another riot in Harlem. Like earlier moments of violence in the neighborhood (1935 and 1943, in particular) the 1964 event involved police brutality; a black teenager named James Powell was shot to death by an off-duty NYPD officer. Powell, a fifteen-year-old high school student—basically the same age as Duke in The Cool World—was shot twice by Lt. Thomas Gilligan when the latter overreacted to the teen’s roughhousing with other young men. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ News of the shooting spread quickly throughout Harlem, and violence began after police marched on demonstrators who had been organized into a peaceful protest by members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The uprising lasted six days and resulted in one death, scores of injuries and arrests, and a vast amount of property damage.1 Like the 1943 disturbance, journalists reported the story of the 1964 riot both nationally and internationally.2 Unlike the earlier occurrence, however, the 1964 riot was also broadcast nightly on national television news programs, thus adding an element of the “here and now” to the events that had been missing from earlier still or newsreel images, which by virtue of the medium presented more of a “there and then” perspective on their subject.3 Such social unrest was directly acknowledged in Harlem Stirs, a photo-text published in 1966 that covered a number of Harlem protests and civil rights actions from 1963 through 1965, focusing on a rent strike in 1963–1964 and a school boycott that occurred the same year as the riot. Like photo-texts from the 1930s and ’40s, Harlem Stirs was a collaboration of individuals with sympathetic political views: the majority of photographs were supplied by Anthony Aviles and Don Charles, the latter who was most widely associated with his portraits of the Nation of Islam. The images are a collage of various street scenes and portraits of people connected to political and social change. They tell a story of New York’s racial and economic disparities, Harlem’s conditions, and the efforts of area residents to change the situation through peaceful protest and other actions. The written text was drawn from a selection of state and local documents , combined with prose by Frank Halstead, a “point man in the pro-Castro Socialist Workers party” and James Baldwin, who participated in the protests.4 John Oliver Killens—an activist and novelist, founder of the Harlem Writers Guild in the early 1950s, and a central figure in the Black Arts movement—wrote the prologue.5 Lastly, the publisher, Carl Marzani, was a Communist Party organizer and activist who had served time in prison for his political activities. Overall, the images and text detail substandard living conditions and the community’s attempts to remedy the problems through cooperation and peaceful protest. They tell a tale of victims trying to change their situation. While Harlem Stirs continues...

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