This is the memory pass. I'm Nate DeMail. We've forgotten James Powell and how he was

there that day in 1964 while the kids were hanging out on the stoop on E-76 Street

up the block from Wagner Jr. High just kicking it after a day at summer school

like they always did and how the man the white man who managed the building

fixing radiators, unclogging drains snapped that day and took a hose and

sprayed the black and Puerto Rican kids on the stoop. Call them dirty

m****ers said he'd wash them clean. Now the kids didn't take it. Started throwing

trash can lids in the bottles of soda that had been sitting drinking on the stoop

just a minute before back when they were just kicking it after school.

And how James Powell, African American 15 years old, was walking by with a

couple of buddies and saw it all and how they chased the man into the vestibule

of the building after he'd retreated out of the range of the bottles and the

trash can lids. And the boys yelled at him for a couple minutes and then left.

And as James stepped back out onto the stoop that summer smell of sudden

water on hot bricks still hanging in the July air he was laughing. A teenager

puffed up after shouting down a grown man. He took a step and was shot three

times by an off-duty lieutenant with the NYPD, a white cop who'd been out of

the fix-it-shop next door getting his radio repaired when he'd heard the shouting

and the bottles and the trash can lids. We've forgotten James Powell's mother Annie

and how she threw herself in the coffin at the funeral home just like they do in

the movies because that's how it really feels sometimes and her son had just

been killed one day after school. The city caught fire six nights of riots and

...