How Hillary won Harlem
“I thought we’d get that talk from Bernie, but it was Hillary,” the woman said as she took her seat in the restaurant. The man with her nodded his head in agreement, and then they sat in silence, attending to the world in their cell phones.
“Hey, soror,” a woman half-shouted a few minutes later, as she scooped food into her Styrofoam takeout box. The seated woman looked up, smiled, and responded, “Oh, hey, soror, you see Hillary?”
“She was real good, right,” the woman making her plate said, now at a different food station. All three nodded their heads, almost causing me to join in even though I was not a part of the conversation. All of this took place at Manna’s, the self-anointed “Best Soul Food Restaurant in the Village of Harlem.” I religiously get a four-vegetable plate there whenever I go to an event at the Schomburg Center, the New York Public Library’s hub for black culture, which sits on the corner of 135th and Malcolm X.
The venue is having a big week. On Monday it was revealed as the inspiration (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cover-story-2016-02-22) of this week’s New Yorker cover art by painter Kadir Nelson (work titled Schomburg Center, Harlem, New York). On Tuesday it was the site of a Hillary Clinton speech, advertised a day earlier as an “Address on Breaking Down Barriers for African-Americans.”
More:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/how-hillary-clinton-won-harlem.html#.
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The writer was swept up in Rangel's intro, which he ended with:
This was met with wild applause from the room, a big smile from Hillary, and a Holder whisper to Cuomo, followed by laughs from both men. It was one of the more street-cred-pumping moments this campaign has seen. You fuck with Hill, you fuck with Harlem. And it capped off a perfect warm-up act for Hillary — New York State, New York City, and Harlem supporting not only Hillary being the next president, but her as someone who could do a lot of good for black people.
I enjoyed her speech so much that I'm just not worried about her anymore. She's got this and we're lucky to have her.
Great article. Thanks.
