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August 12, 2020This post was originally published on this site
When a video of a racist attack on Black children by white residents of Rosedale, Queens, in 1975 was posted on Twitter last summer, it quickly drew attention — and has now been viewed over 4.5 million times.
But few know about the man who unearthed and posted the clip, Oluwanisola “Sola” Olosunde, who wasn’t even born when the attack was filmed.
Mr. Olosunde, 24, is a history enthusiast who posts threads of archival photographs, news clippings and video footage on Twitter, racking up tens of thousands of retweets and likes. He found the Rosedale footage on YouTube while doing research.
One look at Mr. Olosunde, seated on a park bench in Bedford Stuyvesant wearing a powder blue suit, a white Kangol Bermuda hat, and a face adorned with slightly overgrown mutton chops, and it’s obvious how deeply he connects to the past. He meticulously pores through vintage clothing on eBay to get his look, he said. He often gets stopped because of what he wears.
Though he is a model and a photographer, the current Urban Planning graduate student in his last year at Hunter College is most interested in history. But not a romanticized version of bygone eras. He specifically focuses on images of the ordinary, day-to-day lives of New York City’s Black inhabitants in the recent past.
“I post a lot of things that are New York, Black and urban,” he said. “So if it’s a blend of those things, then it’s like perfect to post.”
Mr. Olosunde lived in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, until he was 11, then moved to Far Rockaway, Queens.
“I just wanted to be a person that knows everything about where I live,” he said.
The content he posts varies, from a peek at what Flatbush, Brooklyn, looked like in 1986 to the story of Larry Davis, a Black man from the Bronx who shot six police officers that same year.
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transcript
A Racist Attack Was Caught on Camera. Nearly 45 Years Later, It Still Stings.
As protests and anger over racism grip the nation, a clip from a 1976 documentary about a hateful attack on a group of black children in New York City still resonates. We spoke to the children about their experience that day.
[shouting] “We would call them bike hikes. We were just going out to go explore your world.” “It would be at least six, seven, eight of us. Our parents said as long as you were home before the streetlights came on, you stayed as a group, you’re fine.” “It was a beautiful day, sunshine. The children in the neighborhood planned to go on a trip to McDonald’s just to have some fun, something different to do.” “Rosedale we thought was a safe place. We all went down. We were riding our bikes.” “And then we saw down the block that there was this beautiful American flag flowing in the wind.” “We saw a group outside on the block. So we was like, ‘Oh, this is a block party.’” “The last thing that I remember was someone saying, ‘Oh, a parade.’ And so we went down to go see the parade, and I laugh about it to this day because it was a parade to get the black people out of Rosedale.” Crowd: “White power — white resistance.” It’s the summer of 1975. White residents in Rosedale, Queens, are protesting black families moving into the neighborhood. [shouting] Crowd: “Equal rights for whites.” These are scenes from a documentary produced by journalist Bill Moyers. “Does he have a right to live here?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because he’s black.” “This was not the South. This was not Greenville, Miss., or Spartanburg, S.C., or Atlanta, Ga. This was right in the heart of the greatest metropolitan area in the country.” The documentary was found nearly 45 years later by a graduate student who posted a short clip on the internet. It went viral on Twitter and Facebook. And the question people kept asking, where are the kids now? “Hey, Rob, this is Whitney Hurst calling from The New York Times. My name is Whitney Hurst. I’m a journalist —” To answer that question, we called more than 90 people who had lived in Rosedale at that time. “I’m just trying to find anyone that might have known someone.” We couldn’t find any white residents who said they’d been there. “Came out because it got a little bit crazy.” But we spoke with several of the black children. We wanted to hear what happened to them that day to understand why their experience is resonating decades later. “We went down to see what was going on. Probably in the middle of the block, that’s when we figured out it was something else, and it was something that we definitely were not invited to.” “We noticed that they were running towards us. I was like, ‘Wow.’ You know, like, ‘Why are they rushing towards us,’ not thinking anything negative. And then we heard nigger.” [crowd shouting racial slurs] “Yeah, nigger!” “And they surrounded my best friend at the time, Lorena — one of the young men hit her, and they started calling us names. They started throwing rocks.” “Hearing the word, hearing it directed at me — ‘Why are you calling me that? That’s not me.’ You know, I’ve always been told that’s not me. I didn’t understand. I was like, ‘Who do you think you are to say we can’t come here?’ Like, how dare you?” “What happened to you?” “This little boy, he threw the rock. He tried to hit my sister, but he almost hit me. It was about that much away from me. And I sure wish he had hit me with that rock. I would pick up the rock right next to me and hit him right dead in his face.” “I was just kind of amazed to see that people can act like that, to tell you the truth. But that was like really the first when I was like, ‘Wow, people do not like black people.’” “They always do that. They always spit on us like we some dogs. They always —” “Spit back on them.” “Ain’t nothing going to change.” “I immediately was reminded of those programs my parents would have me watch with the dogs and the hoses, and people trying to vote and being killed and lynched. It just, it went right back to my history in this country. It just linked me immediately with that whole experience because I felt it.” “Do you forgive them?” “No. No. No. Can’t take back no hurt.” “And I didn’t know what to do with those feelings. I did not know what to do with those feelings.” For Moyers, the video going viral shows how powerful images can be. “He just tried to hit my sister, but —” “Because we were in their neighborhood.” “I mean, I do believe that television has been a great teacher. This country didn’t really respond to what was going on in the South, although it was well known, until the sheriff in Birmingham turned the water hoses and the dogs on those young people who were demonstrating there. We knew about it. We heard about it. We were aware of it, but we didn’t see it. We couldn’t escape it once we saw it.” “As we filmed in Rosedale, a group of blacks from South Jamaica was coming through the neighborhood in a demonstration of support.” “Every time a group of blacks get together, they want to help Rosedale with their problems. We don’t need any outsiders helping us with our problems, and we’ll stay white, period.” Crowd: “Right on. Right on.” “All right, so guys, this next scene is very disturbing, all right? It’s the one I was telling you about yesterday. I started a sociology elective in 2004-2005 school year, and my supervisor at the time said, ‘Come up with something that’s close to home that maybe you can relate to today.’ I grew up in Rosedale.” “… and think that I have a right —” “And I said, ‘I want to do a unit on race in America.’ And that Rosedale video, we’ve been showing it for 15 years now, giving it to the kids and say, ‘What do you think?’” “I’ve never seen racism on camera. That was full-on racism and just bullying.” Crowd: “Equal rights for whites. Equal rights for whites.” “I’m glad that I saw it because it needs to be seen. I feel like everyone should see this.” “I think it’s come back up because of the fact that we’re going back kind of.” “Racism is still alive. It’s still poisoning other minds.” “This is how it was back then. Let’s not repeat it again.” “Emotionally, I think it’s connecting with kids more today. This generation is that ‘I Generation.’ They can see it in a 10-second span, make a connection to it.” “Can’t take back no hurt.” “The kids are never going to forget that. They can’t unsee it, and it’s going to be with them forever.” “Rosedale, it’s turned predominately black now, so we’re welcomed there now. That day, the American flag was the image, the symbol that pulled us into that situation. We live in America. The American flag means good things. It means that we can go where we want to go. We can ride our bike down any street in America. But it really represented a symbol of do not enter. So they took that beautiful image and turned it into something ugly for me, and I want the flag back.”
“I used to always think, ‘What would a kid my age be doing?’ Like, what was the life of a young, Black kid growing up in Brooklyn in 1979? How did he look at life?”
The child of Nigerian parents, Mr. Olosunde was drawn to history by the stories his father told him about arriving in New York in the 1980s.
“By the time I got to high school, I was really good at history,” he said. “Like, I did really good on my Regents. And I didn’t have a notebook for the class.”
In college, his passion was stoked by expansive libraries, where he could truly explore.
“A lot of what I was studying didn’t have anything to do with what I was learning in class,” he said. “If there was a term paper that we had to do, I would try to find a way to make it about New York.”
He began digging through CUNY’s libraries and its online academic databases. He made trips to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and uses an app on his phone to scan his finds. He even uses eBay as a resource: That’s where he turned to start his collection of Black high school yearbooks.
What propelled him to begin posting on Twitter, though, was his desire to share the information he found.
“I am a student, and most of my friends — an overwhelming majority of my friends — didn’t go to college or never even finished,” he said. “They wouldn’t even know about any of this stuff that I’m learning. How are their minds supposed to change on things if they’re not exposed to it? And the only way to expose them to it was through social media.”
He said that he is attempting to bridge a gap — that there are basic things he believes his generation should know. That is why he posted a thread on the crack epidemic.
Sharing the material he finds does not come without consequences. From time to time, there are copyright issues. His posts have been taken down. “My Twitter account has been locked a couple of times because of what I’m doing,” he said.
Still, Mr. Olosunde’s interest in New York history, particularly of the 20th century, has introduced him to a whole cast of fascinating characters.
“There’s a guy named Father Divine. He’s from Harlem. He was big in the 20s and 30s, but he was like a cult leader, essentially. And he used to feed and house his followers. He didn’t accept donations,” he said. “But for some reason, he had a lot of money. No one knows how he got this money.”
Mr. Olosunde came across the story in a book titled “Harlem: A Negro Metropolis,” by Claude McKay, that was published in 1940. Primary sources, which he prefers, he said, “aren’t watered down.”
People often volunteer information, too. That was the case when a man sent him photos in response to a post on Twitter about police raids aimed at ridding the East Village of squatters in 1995.
The man “used to live across the street from the squatters,” Mr. Olosunde said. “So basically all that was going on in front of his house.”
But Mr. Olosunde admits that what started as a hobby is starting to feel like work. Work that has become trickier to do now that the pandemic has prevented him from physically going to do research.
The New York Public Library has granted at-home access to certain databases. But, he said frankly, “Unemployment has been paying for my subscriptions to some of these things.”
In the future, Mr. Olosunde, who is currently a strategic planning intern at the New York City Housing Authority, wants to become a history professor. He also wants to curate a museum exhibit and use his knowledge of history to act as a consultant on movies, particularly period pieces.
For now, he will continue to curate posts on Twitter. He is careful not to insert any biases into the captions.
“I don’t have a particular agenda. I just want people to learn.”
