Charlie Rangel, the 23-term Congressmember who represented Harlem for nearly a half-century, ed away this weekend at age 94. In 2021, Rangel — by then the last surviving member of Harlem’s legendary “Gang of Four” after the death the previous year of Mayor David Dinkins — sat down for a 90-minute conversation with FAQ NYC hosts Christina Greer and Harry Siegel.
He took them on a wide-ranging stroll through his life,from high school dropout to central figure in decades of New York City and American history. That starts with his trip as a young state assemblymember and lawyer to the Bahamas to confront self-exiled Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (“I had been a er… before I knew who he was, because of what he represented”) and concludes with his hope, in the midst of Donald Trump’s first term as president, that a second American Reconstruction was in reach:
“You don’t have to be a political scientist to know that we’re on the brink of the second reconstruction of America, where people of color can just be American and demand everything that they were writing about in that Constitution, where they were deliberately excluding us,” Rangel said. “We can build a better and stronger America, but not allowing color to be something that would not allow you to move ahead as fast.”