JAFO wrote:Where is Bed-Stuy?
Brooklyn NY. (from wiki)
1960s and 1970s
The 1960s and 1970s were a difficult time for New York City and affected Bedford-Stuyvesant seriously. One of the first urban riots of the era took place there. Social and racial divisions in the city contributed to the tensions, which climaxed when attempts at community control in the nearby Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district pitted some black community residents and activists (from both inside and outside the area) against teachers, the majority of whom were white; many of them Jewish. Charges of racism were a common part of social tensions at the time.
In 1964, race riots broke out in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem after a white NYPD lieutenant, Thomas Gilligan, shot and killed a black teenager, James Powell, 15.[1]. The riot spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant. This riot resulted in the destruction and looting of many neighborhood businesses, many of which were Jewish-owned. Race riots followed in 1967 and 1968, as part of the political and racial tensions in the United States of the era, aggravated by continued high unemployment among blacks, continued de facto segregation in housing, the failure to enforce civil rights laws, and the murder of black people.
In 1977, a power outage occurred throughout all of New York City due to a power failure at the Con Edison Plant. As a result, looting was widespread throughout the city, especially in poor Black and Puerto Rican areas of Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn. Bedford-Stuyvesant and neighboring Bushwick were two of the worst hit areas. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway, the street dividing the two communities, were affected, with 134 stores looted, 45 of which were set ablaze.
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Highest violent crime rate in NYC in the 60s and 70s, named toughest place in the counrty. Our motto was Bed-Stuy Do or Die. Billy Joel mentions it in the song YOU MAY BE RIGHT; I've been stranded in the combat zone
I walked through Bedford Stuy alone.