Harlem is a place is part-imagined, part-remembered, which for many comes into focus only with eyes squinted, the better to imagine this once-famous jazz club that now stands in ruin, or that dilapidated brownstone where a master poet toiled. Nothing ever exists in Harlem with out the shadow of the thing that was once there. It was this conundrum of Harlem streets, where the past is always partly in view, that struck me on the last afternoon of the Republic National Convention, a time when the city convulsed with protests. There would be a final march, in Harlem, and by its location and its timing the event claimed some instant resonance. It was as if, before it happened, the thing was already historic.

As soon as it began the march was less a movement of bodies as a series of expertly-staged tableaux. There was the crowd at Africa Square, in the shadow of the state office building named for Adam Clayton Powell; here they are crossing Seventh Avenue, once host to floods of Garveyites in military formation; there they are framed by the Theresa Hotel where Malcolm X had his last headquarters. At the corner of 125th Street and Eighth Avenue, which is called Frederick Douglass Boulevard, the crowd turned. Heading north—that most mythic of cardinal directions for black people—the scenery began to devolve. Eighth Avenue is not one of Harlem’s most gloried thoroughfares, but the change of scene also meant a return to present reality, for here we passed one of Harlem’s many fish shops, one of Harlem’s many Chinese take-outs, one of Harlem’s many check-casheries, and one of Harlem’s many funeral homes.

It was when the march reached one of Harlem’s many public housing projects that I first began to register the speed with which we had covered such a vast territory. I remembered the parades that happen in Harlem every summer, with the marching bands and drill teams made up of country cousins bussed up from Baltimore, the group of 100 black men and 100 black women, the black firemen, black garbage collectors, black parole officers all moving at a snail’s pace ; beginning in the afternoon and continuing long past sunset, the black bodies taking their time to arrive at the Mecca Harlem is so often advertised to be. In front of the projects, I wondered if the speed was connected to the make-up of the crowd, which looked nothing like those summer parades. While there was a tiny black boy skipping along chanting ‘No justice no peace,’ nursery-rhyme style and a dreadlocked sister fiercely passing out flyers, inviting folks to the Million Worker’s March on Washington, most of the people marching on Harlem that day were white.

I fell behind. The marchers continued to race up the avenue. In its wake, amid the litter of the protest leaflets, I began to wonder about the people standing on street corners, watching this spectacle pass through. What I heard, when I asked, was times more urgent than what was scrawled on the distant banners asking the people of Harlem to stand in solidarity with those of Najaf, or the tired black power slogans that would be chanted once the marchers reached the rally stage, at 152nd Street:

Fuck bush….Is it gonna help? We been here hollering for years....Our leaders have been bought off…it’s a crying shame…People need jobs....We need to get Bloomberg out and Pataki too…we need to get rid of him….In Harlem real estate companies are pushing folk out…The cost of living…it’s sort of like genocide…We need more black officers…universal health care and living wage… I am for these things. We shouldn’t have to struggle… I never been too good at marching ....don’t see a change. It’s the American way: they need the poor in order to run the country…It’s slave labor, working for $5.50 an hour… What’s the use…I vote…but whatever happens I still got to go the work the next day. The rent is too high for the people who live minimum wage… No way a man can survive without relying on his mother or father or sister or brother.…Everything gonna go up but they salary... Don’t seem like people have say-so. We’re hoping for a change…something has to change. Everybody’s hurting.

It was hard not to think of Garvey, or of the Harlem Hellfighters, whose triumphant march in tattered uniforms fresh from the trenches of World War I is said by some, to have been the vision that sparked the Harlem Renaissance. I was thinking of times when to march was a dignity, not a farce. It was harder still, not to think of what people in Harlem, in East St. Louis, in Detroit, and Watts have done when marches were not enough.

In the weeks since that day, as the election approaches, none of the incoherent battle cries of the march hung in the air. Instead my head was heavy with something I heard once, in the middle of one of those Harlem parades. In the thick of things was a small brigade of old ladies in white. They were singing. As they approached, I noticed how the women around me, also spectators, seemed to know the words instinctively. By the time they’d passed and their backs were to us as they headed up the avenue, I found myself also singing along:

‘We are soldiers in the army. We got to pick up the blood-stained banner. We got to fight or we got to die.’

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is a writer living in New York.