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My latest for the New York Times, written with the incredible Veronica Chambers on the 100th anniversary of the 1924 Harlem Civic Dinner, an interracial dinner that is said to have started the Harlem Renaissance.

This piece reconstructs the evening’s events through archival images and stories that connect the dots across institutions, creative genres, and social networks. Many thanks to the Special Projects team and to Veronica for the invitation to work together again.

  • "What the resulting dinner led to, nurtured over the years in the pristine sitting rooms of brownstones and the buzzing corner booths of jazz clubs, was the Harlem Renaissance: a flowering of intellectual and artistic activity that would give the neighborhood and its residents global renown."

  • "The evening is impossible to capture in full because so little was written about it in the mainstream news media. But we’ve reconstructed as much as we can, relying on rarely seen letters and other archival material to piece together the evening that set the Renaissance in motion."

  • “We can’t lose sight of the fact that the weight of these artists’ contributions is not only due to their mastery of form,” Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said in a recent interview, “but also the juxtaposition of the beauty they created against the ugliness and indignities they had to endure at that time.”

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A Toast To The Boogie: Art In The Name of Funkadelic