Bronx Faces and Voices

In Bronx Faces and Voices, sixteen men and women tell their personal, uncensored stories of the New York City borough—before, during, and after the troubled years of arson, crime, abandonment, and flight in the 1970s and 1980s. The voices in this volume are as eclectic as the Bronx itself: elected officials, religious leaders, and activists who were determined to preserve the beauty of their parks and stability of their community. They had the courage to stay and fight against drug dealers, absent and indifferent landlords, banks that red-lined entire neighbourhoods, and a voracious media that made of the Bronx an international symbol of urban disaster. Some are no longer alive. But each of the sixteen played a positive role in a pivotal time, and they all deserve to be remembered and to have their voices heard.
Portraits in this volume by noted photographers Georgeen Comerford and Walter Rosenblum document the Bronx “faces” in their beauty and diversity: young and old, witnesses to the history they lived and created.

Emita Brady Hill is the former chancellor of Indiana University Kokomo, USA and spent twenty years at Lehman College, the Bronx campus of CUNY, USA, in various roles, including department chair, dean and vice president, and professor of French language and literature, and was the program director for two NEH funded programs, The City and the Humanities and the Bronx Regional History Project. She lives in New Rochelle, New York, USA.
Janet Butler Munch is an associate professor and special collections librarian at Lehman College, CUNY, USA. For the past 20 years she has worked with Bronx researchers and collections including Lehman’s Bronx Institute Archives of community oral histories, books, documents, maps, and photographs.