Washington Heights Residents Challenge Occupy’s Reputation as a “White-Led” Movement

On a beautifully warm Monday in early November, several hundred protesters and I gathered in front of an abandoned building at 181st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood. At 10:30 AM, we set out on an 11-mile, six- and-a-half-hour journey to Occupy Wall Street. Daunting length notwithstanding, nothing could have prevented me from joining the march from the neighborhood where I was born and raised (and where I still live) to the spiritual center of the movement to which I have devoted my life for the last seven weeks. The march accumulated people throughout, in Harlem, on the Upper West Side, in Midtown, in Chelsea, in Greenwich Village and in Soho. But in order to go, as the organizers advertised, “end to end for the 99 percent,” it had to start in Washington Heights.

Washington Heights was once home to New York City’s German-Jewish population. George Washington High School graduated, among other luminaries, Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan. By the 1980s, the neighborhood held the second-largest concentration of Dominicans in the world outside of Santo Domingo – hence, the neighborhood’s affectionate nickname: Quisqueyana Heights. Manny Ramirez has replaced Kissinger and Greenspan as the hometown hero, and I take some comfort in steroid abuse’s relative innocuousness compared to war crimes and financial malfeasance.

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