125th Street massacre

Yesterday a black gunman set fire to a clothing store in Harlem owned by a Jew while emptying his gun on the whites in the store. The flames and gunfire accounted for 8 deaths and 4 wounded. The clothing store was attempting to evict a subletting South African who owned a record shop on the ground floor. The building was owned by The United House of Prayer church on the second floor, founded by Sweet Daddy Grace.

The massacre strikes a number of powerful chords with me:

1. "Sweet Daddy Grace" was a Harlem preacher who gathered a huge following in the depression. Basically, he was a scoundrel in the Jimmie Swaggart mold but ran a huge soup kitchen that allowed many in the community to escape starvation. In 1964, I wanted to organize a gospel concert at Bard College and was referred to Ran Blake, a jazz pianist, recent Bard graduate and expert on gospel music. He said that the band and chorus at the United House of Prayer was the best around. Me and my girlfriend went with Ran and checked them out. They were fantastic! But Ran said there was only one catch: they would only "perform" in a church. They were dead-serious about their role in life, and that was to save souls. We approached the Episcopalian minister at Bard, a Christian/Zen Buddhist by the name of Fritz Schafer to get his permission. He said no dice. The band and chorus had performed there once before and he found them "undignified". So much for Christianity, even with a Zen Buddhist overlay. (I was a religion major at the time, I might add, and heavily into Hellenistic fertility rites.) We ended up with the Brooklyn Skyways and the Mighty Clouds of Harmony. Both were under the leadership of the estimable Johnnie Peoples.

2. The record shop is owned by Sikhulu Shange, a South African. It has one of the best selections of African music in Manhattan. Shange had a show on the Columbia FM station for years and years. He would play African music and intersperse it with comments and interviews related to the liberation struggle in Africa. I was a big fan of his show, after having been first exposed to African music in Lusaka, Zambia in 1989. I was with a small delegation of Tecnica folks meeting with the ANC and a cabbie was giving us a tour of downtown. Michael Urmann, the Tecnica director, who was sometimes unintentionally tactless, (I, on the other hand, *always* know when I am being tactless) asked the cabbie why the downtown looked so run down. His answer, "When you left, you took your money with you." By "you", it was clear that he meant the imperialists who used to run Northern Rhodesia. At any rate... Where was I? What was I talking about? Jack Kerouac? The NEP? Oh yes,it was African music--so the cabbie was playing "Soukous", the popular music of Zaire. It knocked me out. As soon as I came back to the US, I sought out African music wherever I could find it, including Shange's radio show. From time to time, I would call in and chat. He is quite a wonderful person.

3. The clothing store is owned by a Jew by the name of Freddy Harari. Harari is probably a Syrian or some other Sephardic Jew. Jews from the Mideast are a bit of a mystery to me. Apparently many of the rip- off "going out of business" store on 5th avenue in NY are run by Jews from Morocco, Syria, Iraq or Iran, etc. selling overpriced and shoddy goods to unsuspecting tourists. Most of them are deeply "pious" as well and study the Talmud relentlessly. The rabbi of the major Sephardic synagogue in Brooklyn, Abraham Hecht, was in the news recently. This supporter of right-wing Mayor Giulani had basically called for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Harari wanted Shange out because he wanted to expand his business. Apparently, the church upstairs had acceeded. Community activists had come to Shange's defense and were picketing the store on a daily basis. I would be very surprised if the gunman, one Aboudima Moulika, hadn't acted on political conviction no matter how deeply warped. This act reflects how deeply divided and how deeply poisoned race relations have become in this country. If *organized* Jewry in NY was acting in any sort of responsible fashion, events may have not reached the state that they did. By the same token, if the Church of Sweet Daddy Grace leadership had not been so obsessed with Jesus and Heaven and all that other bullshit, may they wouldn't have sold out a black man in the here and now.