Kamau Ware of Black Gotham Experience created a talk titled Fighting Dark in dialogue with the investigation of the legacy of racial violence in the United States for the exhibition Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water. The lecture focuses on Manhattan and Brooklyn’s 19th-century racial history and connects to Pindell’s investigation of touch points in that same, long history. Tracing back 100 years from the May 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, explored by Pindell in the exhibition’s film, Ware’s tours draw a line between that moment in the Civil Rights Movement and New York City’s 1863 race riots here in Greenwich Village. These riots have often been explained as a consequence of the Civil War draft, an alibi that obscures the racial violence that white New Yorkers directed at their Black neighbors during the unrest.