Editor’s Note: This article originally ran on the West Bronx News Network, an online partnership of the Highbridge Horizon, Norwood News, and the Mount Hope Monitor. Please visit the network blog at westbronxnews.blogspot, and follow the link to the WBNN site.

The death of nine children and one adult from the Magassa and Soumare families was met with an outpouring of grief and support across New York City.

On March 10, three days after a three-alarm fire on Woodycrest Avenue claimed ten lives, hundreds of mourners— the majority of them Malian New Yorkers— gathered in West Harlem to pay their respects to the victims.

Harlem Tae Kwon Do, at 236 W. 116th Street, was a standing-room only sea of women dressed in yellow, green, purple, or blue moussoros (traditional scarves worn in Mali); of men wearing kufis, baseball caps, dress shirts, and leather jackets.

As the crowd grew progressively larger, many of the men in attendance walked to the back of the room to give up their place to women, while others shared seats. Bottles of water were passed around to grant relief from the heat generated by the tightly-packed audience.

“This is a time of help in our community,” said Mamadou Coulibaly, a Malian who lives in Harlem. “Any type of event in Africa—weddings, birthdays, funerals—everybody goes. Some people bring food, some people bring clothes. Everybody brings money.”

The gathering was organized by Alpha Kossogue— a health educator with the African Services Committee, a non-profit group based in Harlem that provides a variety of services to Africans living in New York City—and other community leaders.
Speakers included imams from different mosques, representatives of various West African nations, a sister of Mantia Magassa (Mantia is the mother of the five Magassa children who died), and Kadiatou Diallo, the mother of Amadou, a Guinean immigrant infamously shot 41 times by the NYPD in 1999.

At the conclusion of the roughly three-hour-long program, $32,000 in donations had been raised by those in attendance.

Diallo announced that her son’s foundation was donating $1000 to the Soumare and Magassa families, who together lost nine children and one adult in Wednesday’s catastrophic fire. Diallo said that, for her, the pain of losing one son had been heart-wrenching enough, and that she could not imagine losing five children, as the Magassa family had. Like many others on Saturday, Diallo spoke of the ten total deaths from the fire—7-year-old Hassing Soumare, who had been in critical condition, had died earlier in the day—as a collective loss.

“Mali has lost family members. Guinea has lost family members. The continent of Africa is grieving. America is grieving,” Diallo said. “We are all one.” Diallo went on to commend the citizens of New York City for their outpouring of grief and support.

Queen Mother Dr. Delois Blakely, the community mayor of Harlem, similarly spoke of the ten deaths not merely as a loss for the individual families or the Malian community but for all Africans. “We send condolences from all of our brothers and sisters of the diaspora,” Blakely said.

Preserving the sense of unity expressed by Blakeley and Diallo was a major theme of the evening, as speakers pleaded with Africans in the audience to continue to see themselves as one people, and for the citizens of New York to maintain the concern for one another that they were manifesting in the immediate aftermath of the fire.

Imam Souleimane Konate, of the nearby Masjid Aqsa, urged the media to pay attention to the city’s African communities beyond times of tragedy. “You must know that Africans are together,” Konate said, “and we are doing so many beautiful things.”

Civil-liberties attorney Norman Siegel, a founding member of the Amadou Diallo foundation, said that one positive phenomenon to emerge from the tragic fire was that New Yorkers outside of the city’s African communities were uniting with these communities “not just tonight, not just tomorrow, but forever.”

Mamadou Ba, who has known Moussa Magassa—the father of five of the dead children—for more than 15 years, said the loss of the nine children and one adult was both a communal and a personal loss.

“It’s our family too,” Ba said. “Whatever happens to your family happens to my family.”

Joe Hirsch contributed to this report