People associate the South Bronx with gangs, violence, drugs,
crime, burned-out buildings, and poverty. This is the message that
has been driven into their heads over the years by the media. As
Howard Cosell famously said during the 1977 World's Series at
Yankee Stadium, "There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is
burning." In this new book, Naison and Gumbs provide a completely
different picture of the South Bronx through interviews with
residents who lived here from the 1930s to the 1960s. In the early
1930s, word began to spread among economically secure black
families in Harlem that there were spacious apartments for rent in
the Morrisania section of the Bronx. Landlords in that community,
desperate to fill their rent rolls and avoid foreclosure, began
putting up signs in their windows and in advertisements in New
York's black newspapers that said, "We rent to select colored
families," by which they meant families with a securely employed
wage earner and light complexions. Black families who fit these
criteria began renting apartments by the score. Thus began a period
of about twenty years during which the Bronx served as a borough of
hope and unlimited possibilities for upwardly mobile black
families. Chronicling a time when African Americans were suspended
between the best and worst possibilities of New York City, Before
the Fires tells the personal stories of seventeen men and women who
lived in the South Bronx before the social and economic decline of
the area that began in the late 1960s. Located on a hill hovering
over one of the borough's largest industrial districts, Morrisania
offered black migrants from Harlem, the South, and the Caribbean an
opportunity to raise children in a neighborhood that had better
schools, strong churches, better shopping, less crime, and clean
air. This culturally rich neighborhood also boasted some of the
most vibrant music venues in all of New York City, giving rise to
such music titans as Lou Donaldson, Valerie Capers, Herbie Hancock,
Eddie Palmieri, Donald Byrd, Elmo Hope, Henry "Red" Allen, Bobby
Sanabria, Valerie Simpson, Maxine Sullivan, the Chantels, the
Chords, and Jimmy Owens. Alternately analytical and poetic, but all
rich in detail, these inspiring interviews describe growing up and
living in vibrant black and multiracial Bronx communities whose
contours have rarely graced the pages of histories of the Bronx or
black New York City. Capturing the excitement of growing up in this
stimulating and culturally diverse environment, Before the Fires is
filled with the optimism of the period and the heartache of what
was shattered in the urban crisis and the burning of the Bronx.
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