All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wond...er is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I got [to Hollywood], all the movie moguls claimed to be astounded by the reality of my films. How did I do it? And I'd say, ..."Well, it wasn't hard to make Harlem look like Harlem."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Harlem, your hotel is overnamed, your children are raggedy-assed but you go on, survive... the bad food from the two cafes and peddle your hate for the wild who bring you money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I could take the Harlem night and wrap around you,... Take the neon lights and make a crown, Take the Lenox Avenue buses, Taxis, subways, And for your love song tone their rumble down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unfortunately, nearly all the "sights" in America fall under the head of conditions. Hollywood, Reno, the sharecroppers' homes in ...the South, the mining towns of Pennsylvania, Coney Island, the Chicago stockyards, Macy's, the Dodgers, Harlem, even Congress, the forum of our liberties, are spectacles rather than sights, to use the term in the colloquial sense of "Didn't he make a holy spectacle of himself?" An Englishman of almost any political opinion can show a visitor through the Houses of Parliament with a sense of pride or at least of indulgence toward his national foibles and traditions. The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to Congress--these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Failing to divide its social chromosomes and split up into new cells, each bearing some portion of the original inheritance, the c...ity continues to grow inorganically, indeed cancerously, by a continuous breaking down of old tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue. Here the city has absorbed villages and little towns, reducing them to place names, like Manhattanville and Harlem in New York; there it has, more happily, left the organs of local government and the vestiges of an independent life, even assisted their revival, as in Chelsea and Kensington in London; but it has nevertheless enveloped those areas in its physical organization and built up the open land that once served to ensure their identity and integrity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It doesn't do good to open doors for someone who doesn't have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. ...There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all l...ife, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing the kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway--they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »