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)

"Malcolm had been the spokesman for that part of all blacks that is in constant rage at their life in the land of the rich and the home of the righteous"

"I feel battered by culture shock — ­an experience that has mainly served to teach me how little I know, and how much I have falsely assumed"

“What made 147th Street so bad was the kids. They had all grown up right in the neighborhood; now they were killing it, and each other.”

"Jeddy Gates was that increasingly rare phenomenon in American life — a legend who has not become a celebrity"

“They were in Harlem because they were the tough­est guys the department could find, and it ap­peared that if anyone could take care of themselves, and me as well, it would be the people in Sixth Homicide.”

“You know, kid, I never thought they were going to get me.”

“He is a muscular man, 44 years old, no taller than five foot eight inches, and precise in all his movements. Mythology holds him to be the most powerful man in Harlem.”

“When I actually made myself look at Harlem, what I saw was so bizarre that, even with the help of those homicide detectives, I found it bewildering — another country, another planet.”

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