Pauli Murray reflects on a Monday afternoon stroll down Lenox Avenue in Harlem, following the riot the night before, writing that "in my anguish over what I had seen in Harlem, I realized that I felt the same intensely violent urge to strike back against the accumulated hurts…

insults, and humiliations as did the rioters (one of my cousins among them) who had reduced the area to smoking rubble. My despair was expressed in a poem called, 'Harlem Riot, 1934.' For the rest of August I wrote as one possessed, pouring all my pain and bitterness into Dark Testament." - Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat Chapter 18.