Essential Local Oral Histories for Black History Month
February is Black History Month. At Village Preservation, we celebrate it by highlighting not only the many sites of significance to the African-American community within our neighborhoods, but also the neighbors who have helped shape our history and local culture. Our series of oral histories seeks to capture their legacies and tell their stories. Today, we take a look at a few of those interviews with the people who have shaped our communities and our city.
Kevin McGruder
Kevin McGruder’s path to becoming a pivotal figure in Village cultural history began long before his deep engagement with Greenwich Village. He moved to New York City in 1982 for graduate school, after which he worked for many years in nonprofit community development, including with the Abyssinian Development Corporation and Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD). These roles grounded him in community-centered work, but it was his involvement in the Village’s vibrant Black LGBTQ+ intellectual circles that would define much of his historical legacy.
In the 1980s, McGruder became deeply embedded in Greenwich Village’s Black gay cultural life, drawn by its queer geography and the creative spark that animated places from Christopher Street to the piers. He was an active member of Other Countries, a Black gay men’s writing collective founded in 1986 with deep roots in the West Village, and the Lesbian and Gay Community Center on West 13th Street. The Village in the 1980s, McGruder noted, served as both social and creative hub, while streets like Christopher Street grew beyond just a physical space into a community where writers and organizers connected. Through Other Countries and related initiatives, McGruder and his peers emphasized the necessity of Black gay voices being heard in print, particularly amid the HIV/AIDS crisis that was devastating their community.
McGruder also reflected on Greenwich Village as an essential backdrop to the interplay of social life and creative expression for Black gay men during a period when both acceptance and community were hard-won. In describing the rhythms of collective life, he noted the intertwining of literary workshops and social gatherings: “GMAD gets started in 1986,” he said, so “you have GMAD [meetings] on Fridays, you have Other Countries on Saturdays,” underscoring how venues, friendships, and gatherings in the Village shaped the collective experience. Through his life here and subsequent scholarly work, McGruder has preserved and illuminated histories that might otherwise have been overlooked, solidifying his role as both participant and chronicler of important cultural currents in and around Greenwich Village.
Read Kevin McGruder’s full oral history here.
Alex Harsley
Alex Harsley’s life and work in and around Greenwich Village and the East Village are deeply rooted in both artistic expression and Black history, beginning with his journey from rural South Carolina to New York City. Harsley moved with his family to the Bronx in 1948, where he attended public school and discovered photography through his own curiosity and self-education. A pivotal early achievement came in 1958 when he became the first Black photographer hired by the New York City District Attorney’s office, a role that helped him refine a visual language capable of capturing the nuance of everyday life and social change. His early practice laid the foundation for a lifetime of documenting people, places, and cultural moments that might otherwise have gone unrecorded.
In the early 1970s, Harsley’s focus expanded beyond his own photographic practice toward building community and supporting other Black and marginalized artists. In 1971 he established Minority Photographers, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to mentoring, education, and artistic collaboration that has persisted for more than five decades. Two years later he opened the 4th Street Photo Gallery in the East Village, a space designed not only to show his own work but also to elevate the voices of other photographers who lacked access to mainstream galleries. This gallery became a vital cultural hub, offering a platform for Black photographers and others whose perspectives challenged dominant artistic narratives in the city.
Harsley has often described his gallery practice in terms that reflect both personal commitment and community engagement. “I have a running group of people who count on what I’m putting in the window, in terms of information,” he said. “So I have to always keep that in the back of my mind, I have to always change the window. Because they’re counting on what I’m putting in the window, in terms of learning something from it.” His work in the gallery thus transcends mere exhibition; it is a dynamic exchange of stories, history, and knowledge that resonates with the neighborhood and beyond. Over the decades, Harsley’s efforts have helped preserve the legacy of Black artistic expression in New York, ensuring that the history captured through his lens and that of his peers continues to be seen, discussed, and felt.
Read Alex Harsley’s full oral history here.
Ayo Harrington
Ayo Harrington has lived in and around the East Village since the late 1960s, when she moved there as a teenager to live with an older sister who was active in radical Black organizing. Her deep roots in the community are reflected in her long-term residence in Alphabet City, where she has lived — in the house she “gutted and helped to rebuild” — for decades. This personal investment in neighborhood life grew out of both necessity and conviction: she was a young mother in need of stable, affordable housing, and she found herself drawn into collective efforts to reclaim abandoned buildings as homes for themselves and others.
Harrington became actively involved in the homesteading movement that defined much of the East Village’s grassroots housing activism in the 1970s and 1980s. She described joining women who were working on the building on the corner of 10th Street and Avenue C and learning about homesteading through their efforts. She then started taking part in rehabilitating multiple properties and advocating for community land trusts to secure affordable housing. Through these efforts, Harrington helped transform neglected buildings into permanent homes, an achievement intimately tied to the struggle for equitable access to housing in a neighborhood undergoing rapid change.
Beyond housing, Harrington’s activism extended into preserving and honoring Black history in New York City. She played a key role in creating Friends of the African Burial Ground, organizing meetings and mobilizing community energy to ensure proper research, memorialization, and education around the historic burial site of enslaved and free Black New Yorkers. “[T]he point of the African Burial Ground and my involvement was also about land,” she noted. “That’s the connection with everything, is land. And this is land on which over twenty thousand people who had been enslaved, and some others, had been buried.” Her leadership in the effort to remember that tragic history underscores her commitment not just to local neighborhood issues but also to broader movements for recognition and justice within the city’s Black history.
Read Ayo Harrington’s full oral history here, and all of our oral histories here.