Raheem Williams remembers a sole white man in a black leather jacket and blue jeans, standing on the corner as he approached. The man was drunk.
It was after midnight on a cold Sunday morning, Feb. 23. Williams, a big 17-year-old, and his 17-year-old cousin, Warren Williams, were walking home down 30th Street from the 24-hour Pathmark on Grays Ferry Avenue. Raheem, who is black, was carrying a grocery bag.
``Got anything in that bag for me?'' Raheem said the man on the corner asked.
The man was standing in light that spilled from the front door of St. Gabriel's Social Hall. A party was winding down inside.
``You're drunk,'' Raheem said. ``Why don't you go home and sleep it off.''
Raheem had to walk past the man to reach his house. They bumped into each other. Words were exchanged. Shoves. Then blows.
This fight, which soon involved dozens of whites from inside the hall and Raheem's cousin and mother, Annette Williams, would develop into the most serious racial crisis in recent Philadelphia history. Over the next six weeks, Grays Ferry's long-simmering racial distrust would threaten to boil over into riot, with Minister Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam calling for a 5,000-man march through its tense streets and local white residents dismayed to see themselves tarred nationally as violent racists.
The march threatened an ugly showcase of Philadelphia's racial divide just as the city was preening for a national display of togetherness - the Presidents' Summit for America's Future. It promised to undo determined efforts by black and white community leaders to ease decades of racial strife. It would pit white neighbors against blacks, and defiant Muslims against the city's moderate black leadership.
If this street-corner brawl arguably did not begin as a racial attack, how did it come to reverberate so loudly? When it did, how did Mayor Rendell manage to avert the much broader racial confrontation threatened for tomorrow? The Grays Ferry episode offers a rich portrait of the ironies, egos and incendiary dangers of big-city, ethnic politics in the '90s. In the end, a Jewish mayor, the black Protestant clergy, a Catholic cardinal and a Muslim preacher found enough common ground to steer away from what they agreed could be a catastrophe.
The controversy started with one tenaciously angry woman. Annette Williams is not especially political. She is a sturdy, 34-year-old single mother who works as a housekeeper.
