He is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it. He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, which is precisely what, and where, he is.
—Nobody Knows My Name, by James Baldwin
THE soldier of the cities is the cop, I his front line the American ghetto. Harlem, Watts, Roxbury, Hough, Hunters Point, the South Side, Dixie Hills, Bedford-Stuyvesant: these are the battlegrounds whose names are inscribed in rubble and resentment and fear of worse...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In