Raheem
English Teacher Turiya S.A. Raheem, who returned home to Atlantic City in 2008, is the author of Growing Up in the Other Atlantic City: Wash’s and the Northside (Xlibris, $19.99 paperback, available at amazon.com), a look back at her life growing up in Atlantic City and the history of her family, which includes her grandparents, Clifton and Alma Washington, who owned Wash’s sandwich shop (opened in 1937) on Kentucky Avenue. It is one of the few books focusing on the city’s black community written by someone from within the community. As interest in A.C.’s history is at a high point, we talked to Raheem recently.
Your book has been out more than a year, but since the premiere of Boardwalk Empire there’s been an explosion of interest in Atlantic City’s past and the city’s historic black community. What’s been your reaction to that?
It’s been very weird. When I decided to self-publish my book in Dec. 2009, I did it because an agent in New York told me — and this is pre-Obama — that nobody’s interested in black history now. I said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘Nobody is interested. That’s just the truth.’ Then, I think it was in April, HBO calls me. And I knew they were working on something and I had read Boardwalk Empire myself while researching [my] book. And they said, ‘You know, we’re doing all this research and we know there’s this huge black community in Atlantic City. But we just can’t find anything on that. Can we send a limo to bring you up for an interview?’ I didn’t believe them at first, but I go up there with other A.C. historians. ... So then everything gets to be about Boardwalk Empire. And that blows up over the summer and I’m going to the premiere and the parties. It was amazing.
Why did you decide to go ahead with the book?
Vicki Gold-Levi was very supportive. She had been saying to me, ‘You have a story to tell. Tell your story. Publish it anyway you can. Because it’s just such a great story to tell and nobody from inside the community has written anything.’ And I said it just drives me crazy to go into bookstores and you find all these books on Atlantic City — but maybe they have a few pages, or 15 pages on the black community, if that. And I’m like, we built this city. This city wouldn’t have been what it was in its heyday had it not been for the black community.
Looking back on the days of segregation in the city, do you think that the story of the black community isn’t often told because those who lived through those times still have some bitterness towards the era.
I don’t think so, because while yes, it was segregated, it was also a wonderful community and place to live. The Atlantic City that I grew up in the 1960s and early ’70s, that’s the place that I remember. ... One of the reasons I came back to the city (she raised her family in Washington D.C.), was those memories. And even though it was segregated, it wasn’t the type of segregation — and this may have been different for the older people in my family — but my generation didn’t have to deal with the hostilities of segregation. My generation was the one where we had this strong, loving, tight-knit community behind us.
Did the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s start to spill over into the community?
Oh yes. It seemed that we were having race riots everyday in the high school. And sometimes, we didn’t even know what we were fighting about. We wanted to be part of the movement. Whatever the movement was, it was in the air and we wanted to be a part of it. But to join a lot of those organizations in the movement, you had to be 18. And we were like 16 and 17. But it got to the point that we were having problems every day until they had to have police minding the halls. And they would shut the school down and there would be crazy bomb threats. But there were also some legitimate things we could be part of as student leaders. We got to sit in on plans to introduce more black history into the school.
Whenever people reminisce about the old Atlantic City, there seems to be such great affection for it. Why does this city’s past bring out so much love?
I feel the same way and I just don’t know what it is. I think its because the city just has this weird combination. ... How many places do you know like Atlantic City? It’s a small town where you can walk everywhere. And we always joke in the black community: ‘Watch who you marry, because everyone’s related’; it’s so tiny. But you also have a beach resort. I can walk to the beach from my house. And then it’s urban. And there’s always been this great entertainment in the city. It’s just a very unique and exciting place. It gets to you.
Mrs. Elaine Milan is the perfect match for her husband, clearly intelligent, thoughtful and attractive. She had already graduated from Hampton University when she arrived in A.C. in 1964 to work at Indiana Avenue School, and later, she earned her master’s degree at Glassboro.
When are we going to hear more talk about the many efforts available to help parents, teen and otherwise, deal with their own lack of parenting skills, feelings of inadequacy, hopelessness, depression and outdated employability skills?
The elections may be over, but there is still a bad taste left in the mouths of many local voters.
"An urban high school is one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. It’s a global world now so it’s good to get to know people from a lot of different places, with a lot of different backgrounds. You can’t learn that from a book.”
At our family’s restaurant, we prepared special lunches for these Freedom Riders, known as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Other business people, churches and homes around the city offered meals and shelter for this tired and disenfranchised group of activists who had traveled so far.
101 Women Plus began in 1982, during the political campaign of Mr. James L. Usry. Mrs. Dorothy Dorrington called a meeting in support of Usry; later, male members were added as the “plus-es.” Mr. Usry would become Atlantic City’s first African-American mayor.
I’m not sure if many decision-making officials truly understand how important honesty, inclusion and transparency are to the African-American community.
"Hopefully, by Tuesday, March 29, the A.C. Board of Education members can agree not to close this alternative program, which, according to many, has practically saved the lives of some young people."
"For blocks and blocks, I would hear no other language spoken but Spanish. Then, there would be blocks and blocks where occupants spoke a different language at every house: French, Wolof, a Haitian patois, Ghujurati, Arabic, Bengali. One house would have a Virgin Mary statue in the front yard and next to it, there’d be a house with verses from the Qur’an on its front door."
"By the 1950s, Wash and Sons’ Seafood Restaurant was a full-service place seating more than 100. Among our guests were celebrities, like Redd Foxx, Sammy Davis Jr., Nipsey Russell, Moms Mabley and Count Basie, who were featured at nightclubs on Kentucky Avenue."
Judge Nelson Johnson's latest book 'The Northside,' on Atlantic City's history of African-Americans, is missing key components says community leader. Johnson's previous book Boardwalk Empire was turned into the 2010 HBO series, the second season of which is filming now.
His white hair tufted beyond tolerance, the minister stepped into the barbershop and its buzz of bonhomie. Combs raked scalps, scissors snipped furiously, and the scent of lilac water suffused the air. Twenty minutes later, the clergyman stood from the pedestal-chair and surveyed his reshaped dome. The dark skin of his forehead glistened below the white fringe. He paid the barber and paused on the black rubber mat. “Am I good for another dime?” The barber grinned. “You bet.” And so he did — 10 cents on number 357, a wager to be rewarded only if the digits corresponded, respectively, to the last number on each of the day’s win-place-show handles at Aqueduct Racetrack, some 90 miles to the north. The “numbers,” or “policy,” game was a lottery before lotteries were legal. Nearly everyone in town played it even...
With the new TV series based on early Atlantic City, Boardwalk Empire, coming this fall to HBO, I was glad when I received Turiya Raheem’s book Growing Up In the Other Atlantic City: Wash’s and the Northside. Finally there is a book that researches and documents the sights and sounds of A.C. from the African-American/Kentucky Avenue perspective. In other books and TV specials, places like Chicken Bone Beach, Club Harlem and the Wonder Gardens are footnotes to stories about places like the 500 Club and/or the Steele Pier. In Raheem’s book these places are more than just background. The long-gone...
They could be the gang from Gilligan's Island, these artists, washed ashore on an Atlantic City Inlet next to the aquarium, setting up their cottage-like workshops, forming a community and simply wai...
Summertime, and the groovin’ is easy. Tourists fatten the regular jazz crowd cramming Kentucky Avenue, where the night never dies. Inside Club Harlem, they press against the bar and each other, as the organist and his quartet tune up on the bandstand. The music comes fast and the band is tight and the organ looses a torrent of sound. And there’s an added bonus for posterity: the live session is being recorded for an album, a rare occurrence in Atlantic City. This was the scene on the Saturday night of Aug. 9, 1969, when master jazz organist Lonnie Smith and company cut Move Your Hand, an exemplar of ’60s soul jazz, for the legendary Blue Note label. The title song, which became a hit, borrowed its lyric from a joke that Smith’s drummer told about a substitute preacher who couldn’t deliver the sermon because someone else’s hand was covering the text. (The joke is less than hysterical, but the number’s a grabber.) “One night, I was playing a little lick and just happened to say [“move your hand”] to the fellows in the band,” says Smith, now 67 and as busy as ever. “People loved it and always requested it.” It became...
THE ADDRESS WAS 32 North Kentucky Avenue, and it was a place where the music -- and the night -- never died. If the entire block, including the likes of Grace's Little Belmont and the Wonder Garden b...
Art Dorrington's daughter Judah was speechless with pride, and thanked everyone for giving her father “his flowers while he can still see them.”
Few among us have ever experienced the kind of prolonged capacity for high adventure that might make the backdrop for a good book, and probably fewer of those who did could be creatively adept enough to write such a book. Bill Schweigart, a U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduate who served five years in the USCG, achieving the rank of lieutenant, is one who can say he has done both.
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1. Anonymous said... on Feb 19, 2011 at 05:46PM
“Thank you : )”
2. Anonymous said... on May 5, 2011 at 11:20AM
“Wonderful article! You captured the true eseence of the Black community in Atlantic City.”
3. katherine peralta said... on May 7, 2011 at 03:47PM
“I don’t consider myself as a article reader because I think they are kind of boring. However, this article is very interesting because it talks about the black community in Atlantic City, the city where I live in and which I don’t know that well when it comes about black community.”