Great essay on in the New York Times on Fort Greene by Nelson George.  He’ll be here at BHS on May 13th to launch his book City Kid: A Writer’s Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success.

I had always viewed the area as a crucial black artistic enclave. It had nurtured some of the most important African-American talents of the past two decades, from Wynton Marsalis and Chris Rock to Erykah Badu.  And the neighborhood became the centerpiece of this black alternative vision precisely because it was a place where many whites were afraid to go. While Harlem carried the weight and burden of its celebrated past, Fort Greene was where young black artists were freer to concoct a new synthesis of the old and the new, in film, music and literature.