I had resigned myself to the sidelines.
Living so far uptown from the center of the protests, with an aversion towards the subway due to Covid, and posessing extremely questionable cycling abilities, I didn’t think I would get to experience in person any of the marches going on for my freedom. I allocated my energy towards reading the news, donating, informing. This is the responsible thing to do, I told myself. This is fine.
But then I got an e-mail from musician Jon Batiste’s manager asking me to join them in a massive brass band playing a protest march, and I realized that I’d been living on a hair trigger, and all that was needed for it to spring was just one ask.
Some of my motivation was for selfish reasons, of course- I hadn’t played my horn in public since February- but much of it came from a supreme elation to finally be able to contribute my skills to the greater good. To use my 22 years of classical French horn training to disturb the peace and make a joyful noise.
My French horn’s name is Otto. It’s a confusing name for other horn players, because Otto is also a brand of horn, and she is very obviously not that brand. She didn’t have a name for a long time- nothing ever seemed to fit her enigmatic demeanor and her love of the sea.
Then one day I bought a used horn case from a rich man, and embroidered on the front was the name of the brand of the horn he had played.
Thus Otto was finally christened.
She and I have had many adventures together- rushing from gig to gig, walking the hills of Markneukirchen, playing music on a chilly January morning on top of the Great Wall of China. She has been there when I’ve been at my very best and when I’ve been at my most base and ugly self. She is, by far, my longest relationship.
I pulled Otto’s case out from where I’d stashed it at the beginning of quarantine (I’d just been keeping her out on a stand), and was pleased to find that the smooth quick ritual of taking her apart and placing her inside the cushioned interior still came naturally to me, after weeks of not ever having to put her away. I was ready.
Direction: Union Square to Washington Square Park, then north
NB: I didn’t know I would be writing about this when I went to the march- I stashed my phone in Otto’s case as soon as I got there, and therefore wrote nothing down and took zero photos. My recollection of the events that transpired comes from the breathless notes I took down on the train ride home, and some interviews and videos I’ve watched about the march.
Before the march on June 6th, I hadn’t ridden the subway since Friday, March 13th. Therefore, I made every subway mistake one could possibly make on a Saturday morning: I walked to a station that was closed and had to walk to the one in the opposite direction from my apartment; my subway rhythm was off and I missed my stop to transfer trains; and I almost went to the wrong platform to fix my mistake.
I messaged my friend David to let him know where I’d be. I wasn’t really worried about a daytime musical protest getting out of hand, but it felt foolish not to let someone know, and he’s my emergency contact. I think that’s what I was doing when I missed my stop. Instincts kicking in minutes too late, I cursed under my breath and leapt off the sparsely populated train before it closed its doors and trundled off to Canal St. Otto and I have performed these risky curvets many times in the past- sometimes a last-minute decision to grab some groceries before going home, sometimes forgetting exactly where I was going on that particular day and then remembering just in time, sometimes just due to a particularly crunchy crossword puzzle.
The band gathered at 17th and Park. I walked up to see Jon singing lines to the horns- an amalgam of trumpets, trombones, saxophones, sousaphones, and a flute or two- and the horns playing the lines back to him. I pulled out Otto, strapped her case to my back, and joined in. In this way we learned a small set of songs, surrounded by an already large and enthusiastic audience. Excitement, strength and purpose vibrated out from everyone around me, and soon the rehearsal spilled into the march, moving south towards the square without ever stopping the music. Drummers grooved on a steady beat, and the sousas laid down some FIRE bass lines.
As we flowed down the eastern border of Union Square, trumpet player Jon Lampley began the opening strains of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”, and my heart swelled. The Black National Anthem. The song I grew up singing in church, the song that never fails to connect me to my ancestors, my brethren, my blackness. The one song I’ve yearned to hear in a crowd demanding justice for black lives, and here it was, first on the docket.
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the list’ning skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea
I was using a wide grey circle cloth headband as a makeshift mask, pulling it down to play, then back up to chant, sing, catch my breath. I wore the lightest dress I own but still soon felt the sting in my eyes and salt on my lips as the warm noonday sun witnessed our organized disruption.
The crowd grew and grew as we approached the center of Union Square. We finished another rendition of “Lift Ev’ry Voice,” and then Jon spoke. The protestors hung onto his every word, caught in his rhythm even when he wasn’t singing. I could feel his energy emanating out and through and into everyone there. Music and marching and movement flow in this man’s veins, and he was in his element. He urged the crowd to keep protesting, but to also get out and vote, citing the woeful voter turnout numbers from the last election. Enact change through noise, solidify change through ballots. I agree- make sure you’re registered to vote!
“Sing a song, full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song, full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on ‘till victory is won”
Union Square has been home to so many political movements, marches, and protests over the centuries since it was built in 1839. Its name, however, is only a coincidence- yes, labor unions and unemployed workers famously rallied around Emma Goldman here, and the very first Labor Day drew 10,000 people to the area in 1882- but the Square itself merely unites two main roads- the road we now call Broadway, and 4th Avenue. Ergo, a Union of streets.
Originally designed as an urban oasis for the genteel homes that surrounded it, Union Square’s role grew with the city. By the mid-1800s it had become a public gathering place for a variety of political demonstrations, most notably the pro-union rally that erupted there underneath the statue of George Washington after the Civil War-inciting attack on Fort Sumter in 1861. There even existed for a while a pavilion in the northern section of the park built expressly for mass gatherings and demonstrations.
We headed down University Place toward Washington Square Park, now a teeming mass of sound. The marching paused, and a space opened up in the middle of the crowd for dancers to come in and perform while we played a new song by Jon, “We Are”. Powerful marching rhythms reverberated against the buildings around us, and gradually everyone picked up and chanted the chorus together:
We are we are we are we are the chosen ones
We are we are we are we are the golden ones
It felt like a party in the middle of a protest. Celebrating life while demanding life. Catharsis incarnate.
Sometimes when I can’t take pictures during a given moment, I will take several seconds to burn the image into my memory with a combination of touch and sight. I did this for the first time in Iceland, while swimming in The Secret Lagoon, not wanting to forget the way the steam surrounded the emerald green hills, or the angle of the sun on the nourishing waters. I placed a hand on a rock slick with moss and looked out across the expanse.
I performed this trick again as I looked up at the Washington Square Arch, brightly visible through the crowds and the trees, towering over us like a benevolent giant. I gripped Otto’s warm metal in my hands. It’s in the vault now.
What I love most about Washington Square Park is that the reason we even still have it in its current form is because of community activism. Starting in the mid-1930s until 1959, a fierce battle over the fate of Washington Square Park raged between parks commissioner Robert Moses and local activists, including Jane Jacobs, Shirley Hayes, and area resident Eleanor Roosevelt. Moses wanted to expand 5th Avenue, which currently ends at the north end of the park, through the park and down into lower Manhattan. Thanks to the work of Hayes and others, every proposal involving diverting traffic into the park was rejected, and soon a proposal of their own was drafted and approved: converting 1.75 acres of roadway into parkland, paving one area in the park for emergency access only, and permanently banning all non-emergency vehicles.
Going back even further in history, Washington Square also has some significant black history that I never knew about before this month (thanks to an episode of The Bowery Boys for alerting me to it in the first place). When the Dutch settled here in the 1600s, they used slave labor to help them build a wall on the northern border of New Amsterdam (then a very tiny village- that northern wall is where Wall St, down in the Financial District, lies now). Then in 1643 they gave land grants to “half-freed” slaves to settle the land north of the wall- not out of the goodness of their hearts, but to act as a buffer from attacks by indigenous groups. They were “half-free” because they had to share their profits with the Dutch West India Company and pay an annual land fee, and their children were still born slaves. The area owned and cultivated by these people went by different names, including “the Negroes’ lots”, and “Land of the Blacks” (lol). This began a cultural norm in New York of “freed” black people working and co-existing alongside slaves, which helped bring about rebellions like the New York Slave Revolt of 1712, which then led to a slew of anti-black laws and over-policing, the effects of which we are very obviously still feeling today.
I don’t remember what we played as we marched west across the northern border of the park-the narrower street made navigating Otto through the crowd more of a challenge so I was more focused on that than anything else. But soon we blossomed out onto 6th avenue and took the protest north through Greenwich Village.
One thing that fascinates me about the development of Manhattan is learning about all the villages that existed on the island and were absorbed into the grid as the city boomed northward. Some I’ve known about for a while, and would like to dedicate essays to in the future, like Seneca Village (get ready for me to ruin your Central Park sunbathing someday), but one that I didn’t know about until last week was the independent hamlet that was Greenwich Village. I knew the streets of the West Village existed before the grid (which is why it’s such a hard neighborhood to navigate), but I had never thought about it being its own independent area. The only evidence of the grid within this neighborhood is when the city extended 7th Avenue straight down through it in 1912.
Another black neighborhood developed in the southern portion of the Village starting in the 1830s, as general discrimination and white mob attacks such as the antiaboltion riot of 1834 made it clear that creating more racially insulated neighborhood enclaves would help protect them. “Little Africa” included the West Village streets of MacDougal, Sullivan, Thompson, Minetta, and Bleeker, and Minetta Lane. While this neighborhood was predominately black, they shared the area with poorer Italian and Irish immigrants, sometimes even sharing the same buildings and households (many census records from the time show evidence of interracial marriages).
The Civil War Draft Riots of 1863, in which yet another white mob wreaked havoc upon the city, resulted in the deaths of at least 119 people, including the gruesome lynchings of 11 African-American men. I read one terrible account about a disabled man who was hung in front of his mother and then mutilated. If it happened today he would be a hashtag: #AbrahamFranklin. The mobs also looted and burned down the Colored Orphan Aslyum that sat on Fifth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, displacing over 200 young black orphans, and targeted and destroyed black businesses and residences, and white-owned businesses and residences that catered to black clientele.
Manhattan lost about one-fifth of its black population after these riots, which, you know, makes sense. Many struck out to purchase land and develop black neighborhoods out in Brooklyn, including Weeksville, smack in the middle of the neighborhood we now call Bed-Stuy (some of the original homes from that era still exist).
And of course we can’t talk about protests and riots in the Village without at least mentioning the Stonewall Riots of 1969, especially as it’s Pride Month and we are still fighting the police to this very day. That riot started an organized movement that’s benefited LGBTQ people to this very day. I hope in my heart what we’re doing now does the same.
One of the songs that reportedly was sung the first night of the Stonewall Riots was “We Shall Overcome”, and, fittingly, we played it too while marching through those same streets:
Deep in my heart I do believe
That we shall overcome someday
On the west side of 6th Avenue a person with a buzzed haircut and cutoff jeans stood on a vehicle holding up a sign- it read “Mom Station”, or something like that. Below them sat tables with water, snacks, ibuprofen. People thanked them as they grabbed supplies and kept moving. I’d forgotten to eat before heading downtown so I gratefully grabbed a water and some dried fruit, stuffing a bag of peanuts down my bra.
We began to play “Caravan”, one of my favorite Duke Ellington tunes. Around this time in the march I made two new musician friends- Heather & Alivia. Heather just moved here last July.
“What a year to move to New York!” I exclaimed. “I’m so sorry.”
She laughed. Sometimes that’s all you can do.
Together we formed a our own pod in the surging crowd, sometimes rushing forward to rejoin the main group of musicians, sometimes hanging back and creating our own little sound world.
Echoes of the protests and subsequent mayhem the weekend before could be felt as we moved north. I tried to throw away a water bottle, but the fancy new trash cans lining the sidewalks were locked shut. “So people won’t set them on fire,” I heard a stranger say. Cops donned in helmets and vests in Greeley Square received jeers from my fellow protestors in the form of a chant: “I don’t see no riot here — Why are you in riot gear?”
We turned onto 34th St and it started to rain. Our heads tilted up, grateful for the relief. For a few moments it really started to come down, and we all cheered. Otto looked beautiful, her bell adorned with droplets like dew. We revelled in the moment, and soon the whole march erupted into song:
Baby I’m from New York
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of
There’s nothing you can’t do
Now you’re in New York
These streets will make you feel brand new
Big lights will inspire you
Hear it for New York, New York, New York
I packed up Otto at the corner of 40th and 8th, near my train home, and watched with pride as the march continued on, back down to Washington Square Park. My body used muscles it had forgotten it even had that day, and that night I slept like the dead, and tended to sore limbs the following morning. I treasured every ache. Who knew exhaustion could feel so good?
I am fully and deeply in love with this city. I love the layers of ugly truths and beautiful stories that meld and cake the streets like dust. I love the energy that runs through it even now, a quiet and ever-burning furnace. I love the absolutely and incredibly indomitable populace.
The more I learn about the history of New York the more assured I am that we are doing the right thing (not that I needed any convincing on that point to begin with). Even in this “free” state, my ancestors were lynched and beaten, their homes and businesses destroyed and sabotaged (and fun fact, the mayor of New York during the Civil War, Democrat Fernando Wood, wanted the city to also seccede so they could continue to do business with slave states). AND COPS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BAD. I especially enjoy this quote I found by a British anarchist in 1894, referring to American police.
Keep showing up. Keep speaking out. We got this.
❤
-ks-
Thanks for reading! I would of course love it if you could join my Patreon to help support these essays, but if you have limited funds I highly encourage you to throw them at this GoFundMe that’s going for a woman to buy back her family’s farm. More black-owned land everywhere, please!
