Funding for Colores was provided in part by New Mexico PBS, Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund, and the Nolita E Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation.

New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

And viewers like you.

The birth of New Mexico Territory's first American chorus was forged amid political rivalries, conflicts over slavery, religion, and native sovereignty.

This special segment introduces NM PBS documentary law for a Lawless Land.

Once a vital link between neighborhoods.

Cleveland's long abandoned sideway bridge endures as both a symbol of racial division and a question of whether it can reconnect communities today.

Composer and flutist Alison Loggins Hall reimagines American themes and amplifies community voices through her Cleveland Orchestra Fellowship.

It's all a head on colors.

Establishing American law in New Mexico.

Funding for the production of law for a lawless land provided by the U.S.

District Court of New Mexico.

Bench and Bar Fund.

This program includes illustrations generated with AI tools.

>> Narrator: On August 18th, 1846, Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney's Army of the West, occupying Santa Fe without firing a shot, raised the Stars and Stripes over the seat of Mexico's local government, the Palace of the governors.

A month later, Kearney announced New Mexico's first set of American laws, the Kearney Code, and installed Charles Bent as territorial governor.

>>Armijo: When Kearney came into the territory of New Mexico in 1846, it had to have been a place of the unknown.

He came in to, I think, so many questions about what can be done to organize a form of government that incorporates the needs of everyone here.

>>Narrator:By late September, Kearney assumed the authority to appoint Joab Halton, Antonio J. Otero, and Charles Beaubien as justices of what he called the Superior Court.

>>Browning: Kearney had a soldier in his unit that had a Missouri law book in his saddlebags that became the Kearney Code.

So in many ways, the judiciary and the law was imposed by the military before it really began to become a civilian court.

>>Hutton: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which of course, ends the Mexican-American War, not only dealt, of course, with boundary issues, but also dealt with the question of citizenship, and it gave to those in New Mexico who wished to have it American citizenship.

>>Narrator: The question of judicial authority remained a question mark.

Now, a foreign system of laws and courts descended on the people, along with a remarkable gaggle of American lawyers.

There was an immediate push for statehood for New Mexico, which would include.

Arizona, had far more than the required population.

This became linked to the escalating conflict over slavery, then reaching a fever pitch.

>>Hutton: President Zachary Taylor wanted to bring New Mexico and California into the union as states.

And that way, he could get around this tortuous question of slavery moving into the territories, because as states, they could prohibit slavery.

And he knew they were.

But Zachary Taylor dies, and this throws the whole question of New Mexico statehood open.

>>Browning: Whiteman and Halton were at odds over slavery and therefore statehood, because Whiteman wanted to make it ambiguous and continue to have slaves in New Mexico.

And Hamilton wanted to have them.

Anti-Slavery plank within the Constitution.

If it was to go into the Union.

>>Narrator: Richard Whiteman, a captain in Kearney's army, now a legislator, was well-connected in military circles, so his charges stung Houghton.

>>Browning: Whiteman, who owned the newspaper, accused the Judge Houghton of using his mercantile business to enrich himself.

>>Narrator: In a letter responding to the attack made by Whiteman, Justice Houghton demanded unequivocal retraction of such slander or the satisfaction do from one gentleman to another.

He wanted a duel.

Responding promptly, Whiteman accepted, and they soon after met in a nearby arroyo.

They took their paces, and upon the command fire.

Whiteman shot.

Houghton did not hear the command, but did hear the bullet whizz past his ear.

>>Johnson: It's kind of unfathomable to believe that a sitting judge would engaging in a duel with someone he believed had defamed him.

>>Narrator: Whiteman held up his and told Houghton to fire away.

The judge declined if Whiteman apologized.

I'll apologize as far as being sorry is concerned, but I can't take back what I said, judge, as it was so.

Houghton accepted, but warned Whiteman that the next time he insulted the bench, he would most certainly shoot him dead.

>>Browning: The federal judiciary really didn't have any code of conduct until the 1930s.

Just because they put on a road didn't mean they quit being political.

>>Narrator: With the compromise of 1850.

New Mexico officially became a territory.

President Millard Fillmore appointed Chief Justice Grafton Baker, Horace Bauer, and John Watts to the territorial Supreme Court.

Justice Grafton Baker was well trained in the law, but as the strident Southerner quickly came into conflict with Houghton and others, he brought an enslaved man with him from Mississippi to New Mexico, as did several army officers, which angered many citizens.

His heavy drinking was fuel for further criticism.

A Santa Fe newspaper reported him lying in a state of beastification in one of our lowest dungarees.

Baker promptly alienated the Catholic Church by holding court in the former military chapel.

The Castrenza, located just east of the Palace of the governors.

When Bishop Lamy protested this sacrilege, the judge, reportedly in a drunken stupor, threatened to hang him.

Outraged Santa Feans petitioned for the return of the property to the church.

The judge sobered up quickly, and the next morning apologized and moved the court into the nearby palace.

>>Vasquez: The case of Judge Baker brought to bear the conflicting views about religion and the judiciary, the legal system, and rightfully the community, responded that there was a conflict and that the two should remain separate.

>>Narrator: The new federal attorney for New Mexico, W.W.

H. Davis, left an account of the early court in his memoir, El Gringo.

His introduction to his new job came in Baker's Santa Fe courtroom in a case over witchcraft at Nambe.

Pueblo elders executed two men accused of eating small children while practicing witchcraft.

>>Vasques: In the Baker case, the judge really did not understand jurisdiction.

>>Melton: The murders happened of the children in the pueblo, and the execution happened in the pueblo.

Unless they took that person, those two people off the reservation and executed them someplace else.

But that's something we don't know.

So there's that jurisdictional conflict about the New Mexico territorial courts not being satisfied with how things went and reaching into the tribal court and assuming jurisdiction.

And so he made a mistake in allowing the case to come to the territorial court.

And he probably realized that right away because he could not come up with a judgment.

And as a result, the case was dismissed.

>>Narrator: Justice Baker quickly found a loophole and released the Nambe men.

It was quite clear to Baker and Davis that they were indeed at a rather strange and unique place, where the legal rules of the East did not apply This program includes illustrations generated with AI tools, funding for the production of law for a lawless Land provided by the U.S.

District Court of New Mexico.

Bench and Bar Fund.

Bridging communities.

Hidden in plain sight and rising above an overgrown valley is a connection to Cleveland's past.

A bridge that once connected two neighborhoods >>Grabowski: On the one side of the bridge, which is now branded a Slavic village, was neighborhood known as Yats Korver, and that was the neighborhood that was centered around Saint Hyacinth Church was largely Polish.

It was an industrial neighborhood.

Like most Cleveland neighborhoods.

These were walking neighborhoods.

People didn't have cars.

It sort of was a little community there.

Then across the ravine, which is Kingsbury Run, you had the kinsman neighborhood, which at one point was Jewish, and Hungarian and also ethnic.

And the thing that held them together was this bridge.

The original wooden trestle bridge, opened in 1909, replaced 20 years later by a steel suspension bridge.

We noticed Sideway Bridge now is the only suspension bridge in Cleveland, >>Narrator: And it's a bridge with a notorious past spanning Kingsbury Run, where victims of the Cleveland Torso murders were discovered in the 1930s.

In the 1960s, the bridge became a symbol of racial tension.

>>Grabowski: What's happening is the center of Cleveland, which is where many of the African-Americans are living at the time because it's defacto segregated.

With the Great Migration coming during and after the war, the population increased.

Some of it moved eastward into the Hudson Glenville neighborhoods and others followed, went along woodland and up Anon Kinsman so that neighborhoods shifted to African-American.

>>Narrator: During the 1950s and 60s, blighted homes in Cleveland were torn down while new public housing was going up.

Notably, Garden Valley.

>>Williams: I grew up on 78th Street near Kinsman.

It's a very nice little street.

There were frame houses, so my parents and their six children lived in the little house on 78th Street it was a good life.

And I remember when we moved to 78th Street there were no Garden Valley housing projects on 78th Street.

We watched them demolish houses, and the neighborhood flipped very quickly.

In the early 1960s.

And so families moved out and those houses were torn down, and then the brick apartment buildings and townhouses were built, and they were very nice to in the early years.

>>Grabowski: And so you have an African-American population across from the white ethnic population, and the children go to the public schools called Todd Public School.

It's on the Yats Korver side.

And they come over the bridge.

So you have black children coming through mostly a white community at that time.

>>Narrator: And if people in the neighborhood weren't using the bridge, they were aware of it.

Doctor Regina Williams and her siblings didn't cross side away to get to school.

They attended schools near the Kinsman neighborhood.

>>Williams: The bridge was something that I always admired from a distance, you know, we could always look toward the other end.

We were warned very early on in life that you don't go there.

This is early 1960s, and I had no business going over there.

I was a little kid, but we all had bicycles and we would ride through the neighborhood, 78th Street to 71st.

It's not so far as a little kid to go on your bike, but you don't dare think about going across that bridge.

And that problem was solved for us, right?

In 1966 with the Huff riots.

>>Grabowski: And somebody on the Slavic village, Yats Korver side of the bridge decides that they want to close the bridge down.

So they begin to pull up some of the boards which form the basis of the bridge.

And they tried to set fire to it.

And so the bridge is impassable.

And basically that's basically putting border between the white community and the black community.

And that's what we're looking at here.

And it's never, replaced.

So the bridge has been closed since 1966 since then.

So maybe it is not.

Maybe it is a symbol of racial divide in Cleveland.

>>Narrator: More than 50 years have passed since the Sideway Bridge has been in operation.

Parts of it claim by nature, yet most of the structure still intact, while a question still lingers, could it once again be used as a connector between Kinsman and Slavic village?

>>Musson: There's not a ton of discussion around it.

It's more one of the things you mentioned and people are like, wait, where's that?

You know, we have a suspension bridge in Cleveland?

>>Narrator: But it's gained more ecognition after being placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022 for its significance in the civil rights movement.

>>Musson: Kind of nice that people are recognizing that we have it and there's a value to it and there's a lot of history there.

In early 2023, Cleveland City Council also granted the bridge landmark status.

The bridge sits in the Ward five district where Councilman Richard Starr grew up.

>>Starr: I learned about Sideway Bridge when I was a kid.

When I think of the Sideway Bridge, I think of a bridge that was bridging the gap to different neighborhoods.

The bridge has been closed for some time now, and throughout that time period, some development has spearheaded and occurred.

What I mean by that is we now have opportunity corridor, and one of my plans and goals for Opportunity Corridor is to be able to do exactly what the name of that project is.

Bring opportunity to residents in Ward five to take advantage of those.

Meaning if we refurbish this bridge, get it up and running it can really, really, really help our neighborhood.

>>Narrator: That would take the work of several different organizations, including the City Planning Commission, community development corporations on either side of the bridge, and structural engineers to determine the scope of the work.

>>Musson: With some structural analysis and that kind of thing.

You know, I think it could be put back into use.

There's certainly a need for connecting neighborhoods.

The times have changed so much since it was built with, you know, the access to automobiles and that sort of thing that, you know, foot bridges aren't really something that we think of or use too often anymore.

But they can be great ways to, you know, get, get around the neighborhood or from one area to another without, you know, having to drive around the block, >>Williams: A little pedestrian bridge where kids can walk over and hang out with their friends, come back, you know, no problems.

That would be great.

And if a bridge can do that, bring two communities together east side of the Cuyahoga River.

Why not?

I'd walk across it this time and walk across in the early 60s I'd walk across it.

The power of music.

>>Loggins-Hull: The Cleveland Orchestra reached out to my team and initially asked for some scores.

So I thought, oh, maybe their artistic team is considering, like, programing something of mine and some concert and then several, several weeks later, the invitation to the fellowship came and I was just like, is this really happening?

It's a huge opportunity for me as a composer, just, you know, being able to write for this group and to add to my own catalog, I am very artistically, very much a departure from other composers who have held this position.

Truth be told, there hasn't been that many Americans.

There hasn't been that many women.

And people, from my perspective and life experience.

So the original Can You See, was a nonet that was commissioned by the new Jersey Symphony and I was asked if I could write a piece that was in response to the Star-Spangled Banner.

This was during Covid.

This was during George Floyd.

So I decided to do like a very long, stretched out quotation of thematic material from the Star-Spangled Banner, and I tried to do a play on the lyrics.

Can you see?

Because in thinking about the prompt for the piece, you know, and this and the lyrics of the Star Spangled Banner like, can you see?

And the home of the brave and the land of the free and and thinking about, you know, the validity of that or if we're really living up to these words.

Franz asked me to do an arrangement of that for the orchestra, a larger, fuller version.

So the piece was shifting into a more optimistic tone, and I decided to add some more material, a new section.

And it's very flute centric, very flute heavy, which, truthfully, is a little bit of nepotism.

I'm a flutist and I love the flute section here, so that was my way of just being like, here you go guys.

And then I ended it on this really nice happy chord.

It just kind of landed there.

And I love how it ends.

It just it ended up taking a very different turn from the original, which I thought was kind of cool.

I was very excited, little anxious.

But I was so relieved when I got there and it all, like, worked.

I just felt very like seen, I guess you could say, as a composer.

And I also really felt genuinely like they were enjoying it too, which is awesome.

I didn't know much about Cleveland itself, but I did know it was home to this enormous, fantastic orchestra.

I was really curious to learn about this place.

You know, after a lot of discussion about how this fellowship could look, I had proposed really centering it in, working with the community here and the people here and learning about the history of Cleveland I will say that over time, I've really, really learned and come to value the importance of that willingness to be so open and so able to listen and to hear people's stories and to go where they are, like going into their communities.

Last season, I went to the Cleveland School of the Arts.

I worked with a number of high school students, instrumentalists and singers, and we divvied up into several different smaller groups and I worked with each group on creating their own compositions.

So I gave them the prompt to work together and think of either a story or a theme, or something that was significant to them.

As it relates to Cleveland, as it relates to this place.

And I think we had maybe 4 or 5 different groups, and each one did something very different, but all inspired by something that had to do with Cleveland.

And they all gave me permission to use this music to reference in the larger work that I'm creating for the orchestra, which will premiere next May.

That's how I'm compositionally integrating their voices into this larger piece.

Our partners this season, which we worked together on developing a chamber music series, a collaborative chamber music series, we called it In Community and it was an opportunity to have some of their community musicians play alongside TCO players and our partners.

This year was the HK Bandora School, Fatima Family Center and Karamu House, all very different organizations, very different histories, very different places in Cleveland with the Bandora school.

That was the first time I ever heard the Bandora which is a Ukrainian folk instrument, string instrument that sounds very much like a combination of a guitar and a harp.

It's very delicate sounding and it's very angelic sounding, and it's a beautiful instrument, living in that sound world and thinking about other pieces that would complement that instrument.

So from a musicological standpoint, that was great.

My favorite memory from being with the community at Fatima Family Center, I had an afternoon that I spent with members of their senior choir who we collaborated with in our concert with them, and they sang, and it reminded me so much of my own grandmother.

They shared a lot of their stories, either growing up or raising their family in Huff.

I just felt so grateful for how generous they were and their sharing, and just how sweet they were.

So it just felt like very like, warm and, you know, just homey.

And then lastly, with Karamu.

That was a great way to do some more interdisciplinary work.

And we did a program where we worked with some of their actors and dancers.

You know, that was a great opportunity to also work with artists who weren't musicians necessarily, but who work in other mediums as well, and how to make that work with the orchestra members.

It's been a mixed bag, but I'll say overall, what's been like the thread in all of them everybody has been like so welcoming and hospitable and flexible and the orchestra too.

Everybody.

We've had packed houses.

We brought in people from all over the city.

It's been really, really great.

This whole experience has really shown me like the power in that and that a symphony orchestra, an institution like this, can do something like that, and it can be incredibly impactful.

And I'd like to believe that at the end of this fellowship, we can look at the work that we've done here, and it'll be a continued practice, you know, hopefully here, but also hopefully in other orchestras or other similar arts institutions.

And that's my hope.

That's what this is going to mean for me, really.

The award winning arts and culture series, Colores, is now available on the PBS app, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and at nmpbs.org.

From classic episodes to brand new shows, Colores is everywhere.

Watch now on your favorite NMBS platforms.

Funding for colitis was provided in part by New Mexico PBS, Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

And viewers like you.