A Letter From The Publisher: Jul. 31, 1964

A BIG white turkey like you will be easy to spot," a policeman warned New York Correspondent Nick Thimmesch as he started down Harlem's notorious 111th Street. "So if anybody bothers you, tell them you are a welfare worker delivering a check."

In three weeks of making his way through Harlem—talking to businessmen, politicians, police, civil rights leaders and people, as well as witnessing the riots—Reporter Thimmesch felt that no one bothered him very much, except to hurl a few jeers of "whitey" at him. Ironically, it was Washington Correspondent Wallace H. Terry II, come home to Harlem to spend four weeks working on the story, who during one riot was knocked down and out by a brick hurled from a rooftop.

Wally Terry lived in Harlem as a child, grew up in Indianapolis, was the first Negro ever to edit the student newspaper at Brown University (where he graduated in 1959 with an A.B. in religion and the classics), and was a reporter on the Washington Post before he joined TIME'S staff. While he now spends most of his time on stories of government and politics that do not turn on the question of race, his particular insight has made him an invaluable observer at many of the crisis points in the civil rights revolution. "I was with Medgar Evers the night before he was killed," Terry recalls. "My room at a motel in Birmingham was bombed hours after I checked out of it. I was locked up with reporters and photographers in the Danville, Va., city hall when police flushed demonstrators down off the steps. But at no time did I ever feel that there was an absolute breakdown of community leadership such as I saw in Harlem, where mobs of people ran pell-mell in an open battle with the police."

Work on the cover story began long before the riots blasted Harlem to the top of the news. Artist Russell Hoban walked and drove through the streets for hours to renew his impressions of Harlem before he made the first sketches for his cover painting. It is a composite of many sights he saw and of the plain people of Harlem as he thought of them, "worried and watchful." Researcher Virginia Adams pored over most of what has been written about Harlem to compile a pointed summary that supplemented the correspondents' reports. In addition to all this material, Writer Ronald Kriss read widely in James Baldwin's works and social-agency documents, and late the night before the story went to press was in Harlem to confirm some impressions.

Combining all these elements, TIME'S aim was not to just report the racial trouble—which at its hottest moments is often overplayed—but to explain the ghetto called Harlem.