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Joshua Jelly-Schapiro asked me to meet him on Frieda Zames Way, which is not an easy place to find on Google Maps.
No street view photos, no subway wait times nothing to feed our iPhone-era inclination to know exactly where we’re going,
all the time. As any serious investigative journalist would, I immediately turned to the internet, where a website called Oldstreets.com informed me that Frieda Zames Way is just an honorary name for the very workaday stretch of East 4th Street that lies between First Avenue and Avenue A.
When I finally made my way there on a blustering, unseasonably chilly afternoon, Jelly-Schapiro told me that the corner named for Zames is responsible for our most accessible catalog of New York City’s honorary street names. When a neighborhood resident wanted to know who exactly Zames was (a pioneering disability rights activist, in case you were wondering), she called the borough’s historian, who then commissioned retired urban planner Gilbert Tauber to
James Weldon Johnson (1876–1938), who wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice” with his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, was a poet, novelist, Broadway lyricist, civil rights activist, and diplomat. Johnson expressed a diverse range of views about different subjects, including the affinities between African-Americans and Jews.
As Leonard Dinnerstein’s “Antisemitism in America” notes, in a 1918 essay published in The New York Age, an African American newspaper, Johnson wrote of “the two million Jews [who] have a controlling interest in the finances of the nation.” Yet he nevertheless urged fellow blacks to “draw encouragement and hope from the experiences of modern Jews.”