Wash­ington Heights: That was where I’d found my kind of party people, that 25-to-35-year-­old posse of race-conscious black profes­sionals and community organizers whose politics are Pan-Afrikanist (if not just pro-black)

The five stories in this issue do not presume to represent the New York black experience in total. What they do presume to capture are the encounters five black writers had with people in several of New York's black communities.

“If there’s any legacy of ’60s Black Nationalism I find ennobling and empowering, it’s that movement’s Pan­-Afrikanist embrace of Black folk every­where as brother and sister.”

“X is dead, long live X. He’s like the Elvis of Black pop politics — a real piece of Afro-Americana. That’s why Spike’s logo is branded with an American flag. Malcolm couldn’t have happened anywhere else.”

“Black culture doesn’t lack for modernist and postmoder­nist artists, just their critical equivalents. And now that, like Spielberg’s Poltergeist, they’re here, might as well face up to the fact that there’s no avoiding the recondite little suckers”

The coming age of the post-nationalist black aesthetic.

“For contemporary Afro-American professionals and intellectuals, the Harlem of legend is at best a Utopian cultural myth.”

“He was the most financially suc­cessful Black visual artist in history and — depending on whether you listened to his admirers or detractors — either a genius, an idiot savant, or an overblown, overpriced fraud.”

"Always dug Run-D.M.C. because they dressed like they weren't ashamed to be identified with the stone B-boys"

“The black Woody Allen, a camera-wielding Sharpton, a gifted charlatan, an inspiration, a generous sort, a media hound (or barker)”