It would be misleading, if not inaccurate, to say the character of Syracuse's 15th Ward was solely dominated by its three or so thousand African American residents. The Jews who lived, worked and worshiped there also left an indelible mark. Part of what made those few square blocks of urban life so remarkable and unlike any other part of town was not so much the influence of either of those groups, but their blending. Because for all the city’s claim to be a melting pot, none of its neighborhoods presented a more unique or richly textured mix of cultures than its 15th Ward.
The Ward's often-uneasy amalgam of Jewish and African American music, food, religion, idioms, dress and other forms of self-expression proved to be more than just another ethnic Petri dish.
While most of the blacks were Southern Baptist, and as such had never set foot in a synagogue, that did not mean they were ignorant of Jewish customs or observances such as Passover, Rosh Hashanah and the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. To the contrary, when a Jewish holiday would roll around and the bulk of the stores would close, including many corner food markets, most of the commerce on Harrison Street came to a screeching halt.
In fact, Syracuse's 15th Ward became something of a ghost town during major Jewish holidays. As a result, blacks throughout the neighborhood, not wishing to run out of food, liquor or any of life’s other essentials, were always aware when a Jewish holiday was nearing, and would stock up accordingly.
Because stores were all closed on holidays like Passover, and there was relatively little life on the streets at such times, that annual commemoration of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt, as well as other holidays, got celebrated (if only by default) by some of the Ward’s most decided non-Jews. In fact, it was not uncommon to hear an African American mother in the Ward, after having conducted a little last-minute holiday shopping for her family, offer the shopkeeper a Happy Yom Kippur or a Blessed Passover on her way out the door.
Then on Shabbat, when practicing Jews were forbidden from doing work, enterprising youngsters would hang around the synagogues just before nightfall because they knew the Rabbi would need someone to turn the lights on in God’s house, since he himself was forbidden from doing so. This would usually earn the young man a dime, which back then bought a lot of things that a boy in the 15th Ward could use.
Many African Americans, such as Harry Titus and Jimmy Singleton, supplemented their meager incomes by understanding some basic tenets of Judaism, such as what makes certain meat kosher.
Harry and Jimmy, two of the more industrious residents in the Ward, would make regular pilgrimages around mid-morning to the corner of Harrison and McBride, often with their kids in tow. They’d do so because on that particular corner, just across the street from one another, stood what amounted to a perfect kosher triangle: a poultry breeder, a synagogue, and a food market; in this case, Fineberg’s, a small family-owned shop with a well-appointed meat counter.
Enterprising men like Titus and Singleton knew that throughout the day Jewish mothers and housewives would come to Fineberg’s to pick out a nice live chicken, which had been raised by the breeder across the street and purchased wholesale by old Mr. Fineberg. Then, if they wanted it prepared kosher, they would take the chicken across the street and ask the rabbi to stop over and, according to Jewish law, slit the throat of the chicken. Since the consumption of blood in any quantity was forbidden by Jewish law, Fineberg would hang the bird upside down, with its head attached, and allow it to bleed out. Once that was done, it was time to pluck the bird.
That was when Harry (and, often, his kids) would enter the shop and negotiate with Mr. Fineberg to perform the dirtiest part of preparing a kosher chicken; dry plucking it. While most non-kosher markets in Syracuse used big tubs of warm water to soften the chicken’s skin, which made the task of removing feathers cleaner and easier, most of rabbis in the 15th Ward did not consider such a shortcut, however practical, kosher.
Given that, and given Fineberg’s unwillingness to subject himself to the drudgery and olfactory unpleasantness of plucking feathers off dead chickens for hours on end, he gladly paid black families like the Tituses and Singletons between ten and fifteen cents a bird to do it for him.
Standing at a sink until your shoulders ached and plucking feathers from chickens (with the heads attached, of course, since chicken heads made good soup stock), with only a small bowl of water to wet your fingertips, was tough. But as long as you went about your business quietly and didn’t miss any feathers, it was steady work and it paid. And in the 15th Ward, steady and paying were just about the two most important benefits a job could have.
There was also a fish market, Saslow’s, near Fineberg’s, that used to buy fish from Ward’s small brigade of men who fancied themselves skilled fishermen; men of all ages who would use cane poles and whatever live bait they could dig up to catch buckets of bass, perch and carp in nearby Onondaga Creek and Onondaga Lake. The amateur anglers would bring in their catches, negotiate a price and leave with a pocketful of nickels, dimes and quarters. The store’s proprietor would then resell the daily catches – especially the carp – to Jewish residents of the Ward to clean, filet and grind into tasty gefilte fish patties.
In some ways, food became a unifying force in the 15th Ward. Young black kids, for example, would love going into Wallace’s, reaching into the big wooden pickle barrel in the front of the store and plucking out of the brine a fresh, plump kosher pickle. And much later, as adults, a number of Jewish former newspaper boys would admit they learned to love the smell of frying bacon and fatback by walking to and from work through the black sections of the 15th Ward.
And, of course, a place like Stein’s Candy Emporium spoke the universal language of Ward children, regardless of religion, class or skin color. In fact, the shop’s endless array of candy bars, licorice, salt water taffy, gum balls, nonpareils, bonbons, rock candy, chocolate fudge, chewing gum and tiny wax bottles of rainbow colored sugar water had a way of beckoning kids – black and white – from the farthest reaches of the Ward, if only to window shop.
More often than not, however, food proved to be something of a dividing line. A vast majority of African Americans, when they could afford to eat out, preferred to go to black-owned restaurants like Aunt Edith’s and Ben’s Kitchen, which in addition to fried eggs and grilled burgers, specialized in mouth watering ham hocks and collard greens slow-cooked with big greasy slabs of fatback.
Only rarely did a black restaurant-goer indulge in modern, less-traditional Jewish fare like hot pastrami or corned beef sandwiches, topped with Russian dressing and served with a crisp kosher pickle. And few, if any, ever developed a taste for more traditional Yiddish fare like kugel, knishes, blintzes and holishkes.
There may have been two reasons for this: first, there was an unwritten law in the Ward about black diners sitting down to eat in the Jewish delis. And some delis, like the B&B, discouraged blacks from entering at all. What usually happened was that, regardless of the deli, the blacks were made to feel they could order food to go, and perhaps even stand to the side and eat what they had ordered; they just couldn’t sit down to enjoy their meal.
A second reason most blacks did not embrace more traditional Jewish food – and perhaps the more important of the two – was the fact that even though most black kids in the Ward went to school with Jewish kids, and even became best friends with many of them, they were rarely asked to sleep over at their friends’ homes, and were hardly ever asked to stay for dinner. So the occasions for a young black boy or girl to savor such Jewish comfort food as matzo soup or lightly poached gefilte fish ended up being few and far between.
For that reason, most young black boys and girls who grew up in Syracuse’s 15th Ward did so while eating mostly the southern-style African American fare their mothers and fathers had been raised on – dishes like fried chicken, greens, and rice and beans – while remaining indifferent, if not ignorant altogether, to most of the best-loved traditional Jewish dishes.
* * * * *
During the heyday of the 15th Ward, the dominant music in the U.S. was not rock ‘n roll, classical, blues or even country. It was jazz. And just as traditional folk and country music had reflected America’s agrarian roots the first half of the century, by 1950 or so the popularity of jazz proved America to be a land defined, less and less by its farms and farmers, and more by its bustling, vibrant cities and those who lived in them.
As World War II came to an end, jazz began to mirror so much of what America suddenly saw in itself. The music was dynamic, it was fluid and it was deeply expressive. Not only that, it was cool. And perhaps just as important, as a musical form jazz was more than uniquely American; it was uniquely urban.
So just as the big bands of World War II and the FDR years began to slowly disappear and get replaced by small three and four-man combos, in cities and towns all across the post-war America of Dwight Eisenhower, big dance halls and swank dinner clubs begrudgingly started giving way to smaller, intimate clubs. And for a city its size – thanks in no small measure to the clubs of the Ward – Syracuse found itself, perhaps surprisingly, on the vanguard of the live jazz movement.
In fact, out of nowhere the 15th Ward emerged as a hotbed of contemporary jazz styles and trends. On most weekend nights at joints like the Tippin’ Inn, Andre’s Tic Toc Club, the Clover Club and the Penguin, to name just a few, one could find a talented jazz combo thrilling a few dozen or so patrons and music lovers.
What made the Ward’s music scene so unique, however, was that it prospered right under the noses of many of the city’s most powerful, most of whom were white, and a number of whom were unaware it even existed. As suburbia slowly started to take root, as the city’s black and white worlds continued to run parallel to each other, and as many of its more upscale residential neighborhoods continued to roll up their streets at night, the goings-on in the Ward’s many jazz clubs went virtually undetected by the hundreds of influential white civic leaders in law enforcement, politics, business and the media.
And because no one was paying all that much attention (coupled with the fact the right palms continued to be greased), closing time in the Ward was something of an oxymoron. Cocktails were routinely served deep into the wee hours, and on weekends the music often didn’t stop until the sun was peeking over the majestic spires of Syracuse University.
This's not to say, however, the Ward’s jazz clubs catered solely to blacks. To the contrary, some were home to a decidedly mixed-race clientele.
Of all the jazz hot spots in the Ward, though, none had the history, cache or a star studded roster of patrons quite like an unassuming little place on Harrison Street called the Embassy Lounge.
For nearly twenty years, the Embassy was the place to be in the 15th Ward. Its customers included not only local jazz buffs -- many of them students and professors from the dozens of colleges located a relatively short drive from Syracuse -- but some of the most accomplished and successful African Americans of the day.
When Syracuse University All American halfback Jim Brown and Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis, to name two, wanted to go out for a night on the town, it was not unusual for the Embassy to be their final destination.
And when NBA All Stars like Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and K.C. Jones wanted to unwind after a game against the always-physical and always-tough Syracuse Nats, they’d leave the War Memorial via State Street and walk a block south to the Embassy, where they knew they could grab a quick bite while listening to some very cool (or very hot) jazz, depending upon who was playing.
And when visiting musical stars like Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Miles Davis or Lena Horne were in Central New York to play places like Lincoln Hall, the Loew’s State Theater or Three Rivers Inn, after their shows they’d invariably make their way to the Embassy.
The Embassy was the brainchild of a jazz-loving former street fighter named Herbert White, who got into show business as a bouncer at the world-famous Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Whitey's nickname didn't derive from his last name and it certainly wasn't because of the color of his skin. He got the moniker because of the distinctive and prominent swatch of white that streaked across the right side of his otherwise jet-black hair. In the early 1940’s, Whitey, seeing an opportunity few could have imagined, left his native Harlem and his plum job at the Savoy for, of all places, tiny Oswego, New York.
Oswego was a dot on the map on the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario, about forty miles north of Syracuse. Because it stood directly in the path of the frigid, howling winds that seemed to constantly blow out of Canada and across the massive lake, Oswego’s cold and snowy winters – fueled by an atmospheric phenomenon known as lake-effect snow – were not merely brutal; they were the stuff of legend, even by a Central New Yorker’s crazy-high standards for cold and snowy.
But there was method to Whitey’s madness. In 1941, a group of African American infantrymen, the 369th Infantry Regiment – nicknamed the “Harlem Hellfighters,” following their heroic work in the Argonne Forest during World War I – got sent to Oswego to train under grueling winter conditions. Given that there were some 1,800 Harlem Hellfighters in the 369th, all of them black, all of them of legal age, and all of them living in one of the whitest cities on earth – and not just culturally, but meteorologically – Whitey decided to follow them there and open a jazz club.
His plan worked like magic. For two years Whitey’s was, arguably, the most popular and successful club in Oswego County. But it all ended, as he knew it would, when the 369th began getting deployed to Europe to join the war against Hitler. In time, most of the 1,800 Hellfighters got shipped overseas and Whitey found himself with a great black club and no black customers to fill it. So, being a resourceful guy, he simply closed his place in Oswego and opened an all-new Whitey’s in the heart of the 15th Ward.
The move to Syracuse proved to be another great business decision by the consistently brilliant businessman. Not only did his newest adopted hometown love jazz and support it actively, but being at the crossroads of the most densely populated state in the U.S., it was constantly being visited by the biggest stars in the world of entertainment – many of whom had ties to Harlem and legendary show palaces like the Apollo and his old employer, the Savoy.
So when people like Duke Ellington would come to town to play Lincoln Hall or one of Syracuse’s opulent theaters, after the show he’d walk a few blocks down Warren Street to visit his old friend from Harlem. And legends like Ellington and Count Basie didn’t just regularly stop in at Whitey’s. On rare occasions they’d even find themselves up on stage jamming with whichever band was playing that night – much to the delight (and wonder) of the crowd.
A number of times Whitey’s Embassy Lounge would even host one of its own: Syracusans like Sal Nistico, a saxophonist in Woody Herman’s Thundering Herd, Peanuts Hucko, the Glen Miller Orchestra’s featured sax player, or North High’s Jimmy Cavallo, the leader of Jimmy and the House Rockers (the first all-white rock 'n roll band to play the Apollo), who would drop by on the spur of the moment when they were in town for the holidays, or visiting family. In fact, once such musicians hit Syracuse, the odds were high that at some point during their stay they'd find themselves – instrument in hand – walking down Harrison on their way to the Embassy.
On Sundays Whitey would open his stage for local talent, young and old, to come in and jam. Kids, many of them white college-age jazz buffs, would drive from miles away to sit in. While Sunday afternoon could never be mistaken for Saturday morning at 3:00 AM, on certain Sundays Whitey’s featured some of the most innovative and exciting jazz anywhere in the country; particularly when the Mangione brothers, Chuck and Gap, came in from Rochester, or when brilliant young bass prodigy Scott LaFaro – who eventually made a couple of historic modal jazz recordings with Bill Evans before dying behind the wheel of a car at the age of 25 – drove up from Ithaca College.
And while jazz great Ray Bryant may not have hailed from Syracuse, he did marry a young woman from the 15th Ward, who he met one night between sets at the Embassy.
Some 15th Ward residents would talk for years about the fact that, in the late 40’s, when Jackie Robinson came into town with the Montreal Royals of the International League, he wanted to go to the Embassy in the worst way. He never did though, since everything he did -- both on and off the field -- was constantly being scrutinized in the white press and he felt Mr. Rickey would disapprove if word got back to him that Jack was hanging out in late-night jazz clubs.
A year or two later, of course, other Dodger minor leaguers like Sandy Amaros, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, Joe Black and Junior Gilliam – black men all – would spend hours in the Embassy after ballgames. But Jackie never did. He felt he couldn’t. Instead, after games, he would either go straight to his room on Renwick Place in a small apartment made available to him by a former Negro League owner named Jimmy Reels – or maybe take in a movie at the nearby Regent Theater.
Some nights, however, according to a number of locals who encountered him, Jackie Robinson would simply walk the streets of the Ward, probably reflecting on that afternoon’s game, missing his home and wife, Rachel, and (one would have to believe) asking himself now and then if it was really all worth it.
Herbert White wasn’t just some magnet for black celebrities who happened to be touring Central New York, though. And he wasn’t just a club owner. Herbert White was an impresario of the highest order. In his lifetime, he conceived and launched one of the most successful dance troupes in history.
Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers were a group of young African American dancers – men and women – who would do a very urban version of the wildly popular Lindy Hop; a version, in fact, that at times seemed to defy logic and most laws of physics.
The Lindy Hop had been a dance craze during the Big Band era of the 30’s and 40’s in which dance partners juked and jived to powerful, driving swing music. The men – many clad in showy zoot suits and fedoras – would throw the women through their legs, over their shoulders and around their waists, all to the driving rhythms of the era's superstars of swing; people like Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway. While the Lindy itself was a demanding and athletic dance, in the hands of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, it became something altogether different; a stunning combination of movement, timing and rhythm that, much like a circus high wire act, could be breathtaking.
At various times, Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, which he first developed at the Savoy, included some of the most talented entertainers in show business, including soon-to-be superstars Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dorothy Dandridge. And the Lindy Hoppers toured, not with B-list musical and comedy acts, but with the most celebrated African American entertainers of the day; performers ranging from Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald to B.B. King and the Ink Spots. At the peak of their popularity, Whitey had 12 different versions of the Lindy Hoppers touring the country. And in time they became so popular that the Marx Brothers gave them a featured role in their movie, A Day at the Races.
While one school of thought contends that Whitey was both smart and probably a little lucky to have capitalized on the Lindy craze, there is another (probably more accurate) opinion that says the release of the 1941 Oscar-nominated musical revue Hellzapoppin’, which featured an electric, high-energy number by Whitey’s dance troupe, actually transformed the Lindy Hop from a largely Harlem-based phenomenon into a full-fledged national mania.
Despite his pedigree and the superstar entertainers who loved him, Whitey’s jazz club in Syracuse was in a word, understated. The Embassy had no doorman, no canopy, and no carpet out front; just one neon sign, a couple of modest windows and a heavy, but unadorned wooden door. Inside the narrow front room to the left was a long, narrow dimly lit bar with stools, while to the right were a handful of tables and chairs.
In the back room, however, was where the magic happened. Probably twice the size of the front of the house, it featured a small stage with a piano and a few mic stands, a dance floor, and a sea of tables with a few dozen mismatched chairs. It also had, as one could only imagine, a musical vibe so thick and unmistakable the owner could have sliced it and sold it on rye.
On Friday and Saturday nights, depending upon who was playing, it was not uncommon to see a line of patrons leading into the place. And it wasn't uncommon to see a dozen or so of them in the middle of Harrison Street dancing to the music that spilled outside.
Even though those young, would-be patrons knew they had no chance of getting in – at least not without sneaking in between sets – to them the Embassy Lounge was Mecca, Oz and Shangri La rolled into one. It was a place where reality ended and dreams began; an adult wonderland so full of possibility that on any given night – especially a night when someone like Nat King Cole, Sugar Ray Robinson or Dizzy Gillespie jumped out of a cab and hustled past them, that it felt like they were dancing in the neon glow of what, for all they knew, might just have been the center of the whole damn universe.
* * * * *
If there was such a thing as the beating heart of the 15th Ward, it was the Dunbar Community Center, first opened in 1920 as a meeting and recreation facility on the first floor of a small brick home on McBride Street, just beneath the tiny apartment of its director, Golden B. Darby.
Over the following decades, the Dunbar Center would move not once, but twice, each time to a larger and better equipped facility, eventually adding a gym, a game room, a full library, a movie projection room, and a fully staffed counseling center.
During the second of its incarnations – on Townsend Street – the reins of the Dunbar were turned over to Ike Harrison, a kindly but strict, old-school disciplinarian who subsequently assumed a sort of Father Flanagan role in the lives of many of the Ward's young men. While Ike loved it when his boys came to the center to play ball in the evening – if only because it kept them off the street – he would deny any of them access to the court unless the boy had participated in at least one of the other activities that the Dunbar Center had offered that week. Some he made go to the library to read or take out a book; others he made play chess or participate in the center’s once-a-week discussion group, that took some of the biggest news events of the day and analyzed their impact on Syracuse and the 15th Ward.
Ike Harrison served as surrogate parent to just about every kid who ever set foot in his place, even going so far as to check every kid's report card for any D’s and F’s before allowing him (or her) to use the facility.
But surrogate parenting and tough love were just two small pieces of the broad array of services that the Dunbar Center, under Harrison, provided the residents of Syracuse's 15th Ward home. Harrison's facility also operated an employment agency, an apartment-finding service, two African American sororities, the city's only all-black Boy Scout troop, and annual one-day seminars prior to prom night to tech boys the finer points of acting gentlemanly, including opening doors, pulling out chairs, and pinning corsages. There were bridge nights, movie nights, weekly business lunches, and any number of classes on things like cooking and gardening.
The Dunbar Center even ran its own nursery school.
But of all the activities in the 15th Ward's busiest beehive and unofficial nerve center, perhaps none served as any greater source of pride than the legendary Dunbar Center Drum Corps, an air-tight brigade of drummers, marchers, majors and majorettes, and the only African American drum corps in town. Its combination of rhythm, choreography and, for lack of a better word, energy, had a way of bringing down the house and making small hairs stand at attention just about every time it performed.
In the 1940’s, the center’s then-rag-tag drum and bugle corps had been placed by Harrison under the leadership and watchful eye of a somber task-master named Herman Effler, a German immigrant who'd been contracted to teach Harrison's kids the finer points of marching, drumming and baton twirling. Effler held two practices per week and was the very model of efficiency as he drilled his young, dark-faced forces relentlessly, slowly but surely shaping them into a disciplined, precise and often stirring marching band.
Because of the excitement Effler's drum corps was consistently able to generate in the Ward, holidays like Memorial Day and Fourth of July became particularly anticipated events, and there soon became an unofficial rule that no picnic or backyard barbecue could start on a holiday until the city's parade had run its course.
On the morning of such holidays, dozens, if not hundreds of 15th Warders would leave home early and head to the corner of Salina and Harrison to grab themselves some prime viewing real estate. From there, they'd wait in anticipation for the moment Effler's kids would, literally, strut up Onondaga Ave like a wave of syncopated rolling thunder – arms pumping, shoulders square and heads held high – all the while doing what they did best; namely, stealing the show from every other band and float in the parade.
And when those kids hit the corner of Salina and Harrison – the closest the parade would come to their beloved Ward – and stopped to perform a particularly high-energy number for the partisans they found waiting for them, that sea of black faces would rise as one and explode. Some of them would whistle, others would clap madly, and some would simply start to dance in place, as if carried away by the rapture.
Those raucous celebrations in front of Syracuse's Chimes Building were both joyous and heart-felt, and they stood in stark contrast to the more measured responses the Dunbar Center Drum Corps would elicit further up Salina Street. But more than that, they represented a moment of unabashed pride for the city's 15th Ward; a joyous little sliver of time for men and women who loved their hometown and all it stood for, but who, despite that love, often found themselves marginalized, underestimated and treated like second-class citizens.
* * * * *
It’s been said it takes a village to raise a child, and that was certainly true in the humblest and most austere village the city had to offer. Yet, of all the kids who called Syracuse's 15th Ward home and who knew first-hand what it meant to have an adult willing to support, comfort, discipline, or guide them, few benefited any more than a youngster named Emanuel Eugene Breland.
The fact that Manny Breland became a local sports legend, earned a scholarship to Syracuse University, got good grades, earned both a Bachelors Degree and a Masters Degree, and then carved out a remarkably successful career as a teacher, coach and administrator, is not why Breland is important in the context of this tale. In fact, given how many people have done similar things, those facts seem almost incidental.
No, Breland is important – and is in many ways representative of – the story at the heart of this book is because he was one of literally hundreds of successful black men and women from Syracuse who could look back on their lives and say with utter certainty that the things they achieved in life were made possible, not so much because they were raised in the 15th Ward, but because they were raised by the 15th Ward.
Little Manny was the second of Ida Breland’s seven kids, and though he never knew his father, his mother was a strong, stabilizing presence in the Breland household. Despite the fact their humble Adams Street apartment was tiny and crowded, Ida did her best to ensure it was always clean and homey. She would also do whatever she could to make sure that, despite her paper-thin budget, her boys (the five oldest kids were all boys) were always well groomed and always had clean clothes for school or church.
Bill Russell, the legendary Celtic Hall of Famer, once said that as a boy in Louisiana he might not have had any money, but he was never poor. And that was certainly the case with the Brelands, for while Ida and her seven kids never had much, they never seemed to lack for anything either. Their lives were full of activity, companionship and, most of all, love. The material things that they didn’t have, or couldn’t afford, in the end never seemed to matter all that much.
Some of Manny’s earliest memories were of his mom’s non-stop efforts to stretch the family dollar. He remembered, as a small boy, walking on Saturday mornings to a shop his mother and other ladies used to call “the dirty store.” And no, the dirty store was not an adult book store. It was a small shop on Townsend Street that used to offer row after row of damaged goods. It had no sign, no writing on its windows, no shelves and no cash register; just a big room full of dented cans, torn boxes and pile after pile of dusty, dirty mismatched items.
The small Jewish man who owned the dirty store would never advertise. He’d simply throw his doors open and hope for the best. And instead of marking his goods with price tags, he’d follow his customers around the floor and negotiate prices on an item by item basis, depending upon what shape the items were in, how many of them the customer wanted, and perhaps most important, how much money the person had in his or her pocket.
What Ida Breland would always be on the lookout for in the dirty store – and she'd trained her sons to do the same – were dented cans of Van Camp’s beans and torn burlap sacks of rice. Red beans and rice was a staple of the Breland household and when Ida found either, she’d buy as much as she could afford, or at least as much as she and her sons could carry home.
Manny also remembered that when he and his brothers were very young his mother had learned that Mr. Bennett’s Barber Shop only charged ten cents for a haircut, instead of the fifty cents that more modern and popular 15th Ward shops like Smitty’s and Grant Malone charged. From that point forward, Mr. Bennett became the official Breland family barber.
The problem was that old Mr. Bennett – whose nephew Sammy Davis, Jr. had once lived in his little shop behind a big curtain – always used beat-up old clippers when cutting hair; clippers that he rarely, if ever, sharpened or cleaned. As a result, Manny and his brothers would often emerge from ten minutes in Mr. Bennett’s barber chair looking like they’d just gone five rounds with Carmen Basilio, the local welterweight.
And every time he’d realize it was time to walk down to Mr. Bennett’s to get a haircut again, Manny would start imagining himself in one of those comfortable padded chairs in Grant Malone, reading a comic book among the men who idled away their afternoons there, getting his hair cut with one of those fine new electric clippers that he saw Grant Malone’s four barbers – each of them decked out in a fine white cotton barber jacket – using every time he walked by the shop’s large, clean and brightly lit front window.
It wasn’t long before Manny went to the Boy’s Club, built himself a shine box and started hustling up and down Harrison Street and places like the Hotel Syracuse, the Onondaga Hotel and the Yates Hotel, offering shoe shines to business men and travelers for the bargain price of just one nickel. Not long after that he came home after shining shoes one day and told his mother over dinner he wasn’t going to go to Mr. Bennett’s anymore. He said he had his own money for haircuts now and that he was going to go to Grant Malone. They use electric clippers there, he told his brothers lifting a spoonful of rice and beans to his mouth, and the barbers all wear white jackets. "From now on, he said, "that’s where I’m gonna get my hair cut."
Little Manny, the budding entrepreneur, also made sure every Friday before sunset he was at the synagogue around the block from his house, because sundown Friday was the official start of Shabbat and he knew the rabbi would need someone to turn the lights on in the synagogue for him, as well as maybe do a few other jobs. Those few minutes of time Manny committed each week to pulling himself away from his buddies to do the rabbi’s “work” for him – simple tasks that his religion prohibited him from doing – were worth anywhere from ten cents to two bits a week, depending upon what the rabbi needed.
But Manny got parenting from outside the family as well. As was mentioned, children growing up in the Ward often had many mothers, and little Manny Breland was no different. When he would stop by a friend’s house, if after eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a piece of homemade sweet potato pie, he didn’t sweep up the crumbs and clean his plate, his friend’s mother would scold him and make him clean up while she waited, often with her arms crossed.
And because this network of mothers was so real, and each woman so involved in teaching kids throughout the Ward, many were called “Mother." In Manny’s case, some of the most important women in his early life – in addition to his own mother – were kind, loving and stern 15th Ward “mothers” like Mother Moody, Mother Reeves and Mother Hixon.
Of course, none of them ever locked their doors during the day, so young Manny and the other boys his age were free to come and go as they pleased.
Manny Breland may have had many mothers, he only had one father. Ike Harrison emerged as a father figure to hundreds of young black children in the Ward, and his impact on them was incalculable. Manny, for one, might have lived a life full of closed doors and dead end streets if not for the wisdom and guidance of the Dunbar Center executive director.
One time when Manny was just fourteen, former Vice President Henry Wallace was running for President. The year was 1948 and Wallace represented what was then called the Progressive Party. Among the planks of the Progressive Party platform were renewing relations with Russia, ending the fledgling Cold War, instituting universal health care, and most important to the people of the 15th Ward, rolling out equal voting rights and ending once and for all the practice of racial segregation. In fact, on his campaign trail that year Wallace supposedly would not eat in any establishment that did not serve blacks.
Manny was on the corner of Harrison and Townsend one Saturday afternoon, watching as a young white man in a tan gabardine suit set up a stepladder and folding table, on which he placed some chips and dip and a small record player. He then turned on the music, stood on the ladder and, using the bullhorn, started talking about the American labor movement. He told the people gathered that the principles espoused by Wallace and the labor movement would mean great things to the working man of America – particularly the American Negro. He said that if they joined the Progressive Party they could help elect Henry Wallace and he would in turn help change life for the better in Syracuse’s 15th Ward.
He then passed around a sign-up sheet and asked people to register as members of his party. You didn’t need to be old enough to vote, the man said, just sign your name and give us your address.
Manny thought the man made a lot of sense, and wanted to sign the form, but something told him to hold off. And while a few of his friends did put their names and addresses on paper and did, indeed, sign the form, he chose instead to walk a few blocks down Townsend to the Dunbar Center and have a talk with Mr. Harrison. Ike, who'd taken Manny under his wing by then and was mentoring him both on and off the court, was outraged when the youngster told him what he was thinking about doing.
“Don’t you sign anything!” he bellowed at the wide eyed youngster from behind his desk. “Do not sign a thing. You hear me? Those people stand for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.”
Because of Ike’s outburst, Manny never did end up signing the form, so he never had to face the consequences for having done so. But years later, two of his friends were not so lucky. One of them had gotten a great job after high school at the local General Electric plant, which by then had started to get a lot of government contact and Defense Department work. But when G.E. began vetting its Syracuse-area employees and discovered that Manny’s friend had joined a political party with Communist affiliations – even though he had done so unwittingly, and was just fourteen years old at the time – he was fired. And the other, a few years into what seemed to be a budding Army career, was given a dishonorable discharge when his commanding officer learned that while in junior high school the young soldier had been a “communist sympathizer.”
Another time, Ike paraded young Manny into the Dunbar Center library and introduced him to Mrs. Ireland, the silver-haired white lady behind the counter who was on loan from the Syracuse Public Library. Ike winked and told Mrs. Ireland that it was her job to make sure Manny became one of her best readers. From there, the librarian took over and did the rest. Mrs. Ireland picked out books every week that she thought Manny would like and encouraged him to check them out and take them home to read.
Then when he returned each book she’d sit with him and talk about it in detail. Manny was amazed at how much Mrs. Ireland knew, and he initially read not so much because he liked books, but because he didn’t want to disappoint her. He didn’t want to disappoint Mr. Harrison either. The last thing he wanted to happen was for word to get back to Ike that Manny was making it hard for Mrs. Ireland to do the job he'd given her. So every time the nice old librarian would give him a book to check out, he’d dutifully plow through it and get it back a week or so later.
A funny thing happened, though. Reading all those books out of duty, Manny slowly began to develop a love of reading. He found that books could take him to places far beyond the borders of the Ward, places he never even knew existed. The books told him richer, more exciting stories than he ever heard on the radio. Eventually, Manny began to view reading not so much as duty or obligation, as he once had, but as fun. He started reading for the sheer enjoyment of it and soon found he could whip through a book in a day or two.
Manny also liked it when Mrs. Ireland, perhaps out of gratitude for his diligence, started setting aside the new issue of Boy’s Life each month, hiding it under the counter so that that Manny got to read it before it fell into the dirty, sweaty hands of the other boys.
But Manny Breland was not just an avid reader and good student. On the basketball court, Ike Harrison recognized he was a special athlete. Before he even reached his teenage years, Ike allowed Manny to compete against kids his age – the junior boys – where his relative size and strength dictated he play under the basket; rebounding, blocking shots and shooting from down low. When time came for the kids Manny’s age to leave, and for the senior boys' games to start, Ike would throw his young protégé a fresh jersey and tell him to stick around.
During the senior games, Ike had Manny playing against boys often three and four years older – not to mention taller, stronger and faster. Manny wouldn't play under the basket, like he did in game against those his own age. Instead, he became a ball handler and ran his team from the guard position. This constant shifting back and forth from big man to guard rounded out Manny’s game considerably, and allowed him to hone both his inside post moves and his outside perimeter skills.
Bringing the ball up against some of the quickest, most athletic boys in the Dunbar Center, Manny turned himself into an excellent dribbler, while at the same time developing acute court awareness and an almost savant-like ability to sense where all ten players were at any time. In fact, after just a few weeks of playing with the senior boys, little Manny had turned himself into, arguably, the best passer in the Dunbar Center League, and one of its best ball handlers too – despite being the youngest kid in the league, and by quite a margin.
Of all the things that Ike Harrison did for Manny, though, perhaps the greatest came just before the budding young sports star was about to enter high school. Manny’s guidance counselor at Madison Junior High had sat him down one spring morning and suggested a particular course of study he thought Manny should follow when he entered Central High. He also gave Manny a standard parental consent form, which he'd filled out, complete with the courses he suggested Manny take, and asked the boy to have his mother sign it.
Before showing it to his mother, however, Manny decided he’d better first run it by Ike, just to see what he thought. Harrison took one look at the form and hit the roof. He saw classes like mechanical drawing and wood shop. “What is this garbage?” bellowed Ike, rising from his chair, scowling. “These aren’t courses that are going to get you into college. If you’re going to college, you need college prep courses! They’re designed to prepare you for college, Manny. You understand?”
He continued: “Where’s your algebra, huh? And where’s earth science? And I don’t see no language here. You wanna go to college, you’re gonna need a damn language. Hell, colleges don’t care about mechanical drawing, boy! Colleges want French! That’s what colleges want!”
Ike’s eyes were burning. He was seething, incensed that a man with such influence over so many young lives could either not see potential in this boy or was too unwilling or cynical to provide him the opportunity to explore the upper reaches of his talents. He demanded Manny return the form to his guidance counselor and make him re-do it, replacing the vocational training courses with college prep ones.
Manny did what Ike suggested, but the guidance counselor resisted. He felt that Manny’s odds of getting into college were long, at best. His family had no money, and even if he was a great basketball player, it was 1949 and it was not like colleges were lining up to hand out scholarships to Negro boys. In fact, Syracuse University, less than a mile up the hill, had never once given a full athletic scholarship to any African American in any sport.
The two men went back and forth, using Manny as the courier in their serve-and-volley battle of wills over the young man’s future. The guidance counselor was resolute, but Ike proved to be even more so. He would not budge and was ready to fall on his sword should an intelligent and hard-working kid like Manny Breland be forced to take a bunch of trade school courses. Finally, the guidance counselor relented, but not before exhibiting the characteristics of a petulant child, warning Manny that, in his humble opinion, he was now in way over his head.
Manny, undaunted, did indeed go to Central High and took the college prep courses Ike had pushed him to take. He also starred in three sports, made All City for four consecutive years in basketball, and earned mostly A’s and B’s in the classroom. So when the time came, and Syracuse University determined it was finally ready to give a Negro boy a full scholarship to attend their prestigious institution, they didn’t have to look far. In fact, Manny Breland was right under their nose -- literally – in the shadows of the university at the bottom of Adams Street, where he’d spent his entire academic career.
Manny had a wonderful run, both as a student athlete (he started and led the Syracuse Orangemen to the NCAA tournament) and as a teacher, coach and school administrator. And when he retired decades later from the Syracuse School District, and for one last time walked out of his office in the now-refurbished Washington Irving Elementary School in Syracuse’s old 15th Ward, Manny Breland had, quite literally, come full circle. His academic life had made one full and perfectly symmetrical loop and landed ever so softly in the exact same spot – and, in fact, the exact same building – where it had begun.
What's more, over the course of his academic life – a nearly twenty year stretch during which he was given support from the mothers of the 15th Ward, given guidance and inspiration in places like the Boy’s Club and the Dunbar Center, and given structure and discipline in schools like Washington Irving, Madison, Central and SU – Manny Breland achieved a rare distinction for any young man growing up in 20th Century America, even though it wouldn't be until decades later that he realized it.
It wasn’t until this child of the Ward was almost fifty that it occurred to him that for nearly two decades – from his first day of kindergarten, through grammar school, junior high, high school, and college, and up to and including his final day of graduate school – that he had been able to tuck his books under one arm and walk to school, never once having to leave the comfort and security of the 15th Ward.
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