Volume 53, Number 12 · July 13, 2006
Blacking Up
By Darryl Pinckney
Dancing in the Dark
by Caryl Phillips
Knopf, 214 pp., $23.95
In Black Manhattan, a history of blacks in New York City from 1626 to 1930,[1] James Weldon Johnson observes that the city's race riot of 1900 began, as many urban riots have, because of a police incident. A black man who'd gone to buy a cigar and left his wife on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 41st Street returned to find a plainclothes policeman trying to arrest her for 'soliciting.' The white man struck the black man with a club; the black man lashed back with a knife. The white man died; the black man went into hiding. After the funeral, mourners grew restive under their desire for vengeance:
Review, 3897 words
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