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Living through a Revolution

Craig McGregor July 21

America in the 1960s, Harlem, New York – a place of where the extremities of the American dream, its soaring politics, its racism and its terrible energy, were thrashed out daily on the streets. It was here that Craig McGregor lived for two years with his young family – studying as a Harkness Fellow and writing for The New York Times under Seymour Peck. In the latest issue of Meanjin, McGregor recalls what is was like to live in American through her many revolutions: anti-Vietnam marches, Nixon, Black power, free love, feminism, poverty, New Journalism and racial violence. An extract is below. Read the full essay on our editions page, here.




America. It was like living through a revolution. Machine-gun nests on the steps of the Capitol, massive anti-Vietnam marches on Washington, riot police in New York, students gunned down at Kent State, black power, Black Panthers, flower power, Woodstock,civil rights marches, the universities closed down by student radicals, and everywhere a sense that America, the empire state, was about to implode. But there was also a sense of incredible optimism, that we were involved in the making of a counterculture, and that even if the political revolution failed the cultural revolution would succeed.

Jane and I were living in uptown Manhattan, pitched between the white citadel of Columbia University and the black cyclotron of Harlem—the Demilitarised Zone, as the taxi drivers who refused to take us there called it. It didn’t seem too demilitarised to me. We had our four young children with us and were living in an old tenement block that Columbia University had tried to tear down to build a gym but which student protestors wanted to save because there were poor blacks living there. This had led to the Morningside Height riots. Some of the apartments had been trashed by Columbia, which ripped out all the plumbing and heating and other services; the building was three-quarters deserted, the corridors dark, rubbish-strewn and dangerous. We were staying, illegally, in an apartment that was officially rented by a Columbia academic who’d become sick of the violence and moved to upstate New York. When he had lived there he’d carried two wallets: one for the muggers and one for himself. Morningside Park, which fronted on to our apartment block, was nicknamed Muggers Alley.

We sent our children to PS 36-125, which was about 90 per cent black and Puerto Rican schoolkids. The week after they started a seven-year-old girl was raped in the school grounds. People got mugged regularly, some at knifepoint. A few months earlier a local storekeeper, an old lady, had her wrist broken in a hold-up. Then a boutique on 123rd Street, which the girls from nearby Barnard College go to, was held up at gunpoint. Our building was heavily armed; nearly every apartment had a gun of some sort. Another academic, Professor Victor Reed, a big guy from the South, had a shotgun, two rifles, a spring-, a chain, an iron-bar police lock and a steel sheet on the front door. There was a system of buzzing codes for the lobby and apartment doors, but sometimes guys raced across from the park and into the building before anyone could stop them. We avoided the lifts. You didn’t want to be trapped…


 

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