Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  Blacks were chased, attacked, dragged from buses and streetcars, and beaten. Any black person who happened to be on the street that day and night was assaulted.

  William Elliott was arrested for carrying a pistol. He was taken apparently unharmed to the Thirty-seventh Street police station. By the time he left, his brains had been beaten out of his head.

  Area hospitals were full of black people whose heads had been bashed in. The local police courts were jammed with black people who had been arrested. When an outraged magistrate demanded that some of the white rioters be brought before him as well, one lone teenager was hauled in. He was accused of trying to trip a police officer.

  Yet in the aftermath of these riots, the New York Times went so far as to make the curious claim that there were no signs that blacks were distrusted or disliked, stating, in fact, the contrary: “His crude melodies and childlike antics are more than tolerated.…”

  Henry Turner, a bishop in Georgia, said plainly, “Hell would be an improvement upon the United States when the Negro is involved.”

  “No man hates this Nation more than I do,” he said.

  Harlem had to happen, a place where blacks could be apart and away from this kind of injustice. They needed a place of their own, a place where they could feel they belonged, a place where they could be part of something, a place where impossible dreams could anyway be dreamed.

  Blacks by and large had missed out on land allotted under the Homestead Act. This, then, would have to be their collective plot. Harlem as no other place would be theirs.

  Blackamerica needed Harlem. Oddly enough, Harlem needed Blackamerica. The time was right for it.

  If it had been a question only of fleeing the reign of terror, degradation, and racial violence that rampaged in the South, black men and women would have fled long before they did. They would have escaped as soon after the destruction of slavery as they had been able. If it had been a question of economics only and the search for jobs, the Great Migration would have been greatest during the industrial boom of the 1870s.

  But rather, some unseen hand was at work here, some strange force far subtler and more insidious even than merely time and circumstance, something far more akin to the influence of stars and planets, perhaps, than to that which can be plotted on social and economic flow charts.

  Out of the South they came, these black men and women, out of the South and ready for something new, a new generation ready to be something new.

  By then of course blacks had been living in Manhattan for close to three hundred years, since 1626 when it was still a Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam and eleven Africans were imported to work as indentured servants. After 1664 other blacks began to arrive. The Dutch had given way by then to the English. New Amsterdam had become New York. The indentured servants had become slaves.

  Some of the blacks lived even then in the village called Harlem, but by the time slavery was abolished in New York in 1827, most blacks lived on the south end of the island. By the time of the 1830 census there were 13,976 blacks living in New York. Most of them had been born there.

  By the end of the century, however, more than half the black population had been born elsewhere.

  Certainly they came from other parts of the United States, from the islands in the Caribbean, from all around the black universe, but by and large the new arrivals to New York City came from the Deep South, bringing with them their music, their food, their language and religion, influencing and perhaps even laying the foundation for an entire culture.

  Out of the South they came: the businessmen, the educated, the politicians, and the skilled workers; but came too the unskilled workers, the cooks and the maids, the waiters, the coachmen, the physical laborers; came too even those who had fewer skills than these, many of them vagrants, vagabonds, and criminals, some out for a taste of city life, some who came only to see and then never went back, some running away from home. Some wanted nothing more than a change. All of them were part of the new generation of blacks with whom the elements of nature and time had conspired. For these who came were not merely answering the call to the big city. These who came were responding to circumstances created in part by the end of slavery. These who came were not the former slaves themselves but the sons of slaves, the daughters of slaves, the grandchildren of slaves. They were a new kind of Blackamerican evolving out of the old. They had not experienced in the same way as their parents and grandparents so complete and abject a denial of their humanity. They wanted to expand and grow. They thought they owned a piece of the future.

  For the most part the older generation continued even in freedom the lives they had known in slavery days. As sharecroppers and tenant farmers now, they worked the same land they had once worked as slaves. They could conceive of little else.

  The new generation, however, wanted more. Surely they came to escape the South’s restrictions on what they could and could not do, who they could and could not be, and surely they were fleeing the violence of the South and a culture that reserved for them only the chaff and the dregs, at best. Just as surely they came to earn the higher wages offered in the mechanized North. But what their parents and grandparents could hardly fathom, what the whites who needed their labors on farms throughout the South refused to recognize, was what really drew the new generation, the New Negro, as he called himself, to places like New York City, and specifically to this place called Harlem. It was to create a new identity.

  The world around them was in the midst of enormous social evolution. In the North institutionalized racism was under siege. Laws were being passed attempting to guarantee equal rights for blacks. Since 1873 they could vote in New York State without impediment. Because of new legislation they could now, at least by law, share buses and trains with whites, go to the same theaters, eat in the same restaurants, be buried in the same public cemeteries.

  In the 1880s a black man served on a New York City jury. Separate education ended when the last three black schools were brought into the same system as other public schools. Ten years later Susan Frazier became the first black teacher in a white public school.

  It wasn’t utopia; there was still discrimination, still a lot of racial hatred; but the world was in transition. Now there was possibility.

  Now too came the explosion, and the numbers more than doubled. In the final decade of the nineteenth century over a hundred thousand blacks fled the South, twenty-five thousand to New York City alone. Between 1890 and 1910 two hundred thousand additional blacks had migrated to cities in the North and the West.

  In Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Gilbert Osofsky writes, “The most important factor underlying the establishment of Harlem as a Negro community was the substantial increase of Negro population in New York City in the years 1890–1914.”

  The black population of New York City had tripled.

  It was all boiling together now. The moon and the stars and all the planets were on the move. The industrialization of the late nineteenth century was gathering steam and needed manpower. The Great Migration was on full blast. Harlem as Harlem was becoming inevitable.

  Came then the world war, and with it more black immigrants. The war machine, like the industrial machine, needed manpower. Blacks fled the farm and aimed for the city to power the machinery that European immigration had previously helped to fuel, but which now because of the war had fallen off. When the war ended, blacks were still coming, from the South certainly, but from the Caribbean as well, assisted by the immigration laws of the 1920s, which had severely curtailed the influx of Europeans but virtually ignored islanders from the West Indies.

  And so they came. Oh! how they came, these blacks from the South and from the islands, came to make Harlem, came seeking the future, but came as well to escape, for with the increasing numbers of blacks came the typical knee-jerk reaction of whites sensing that the invader has simply gone too far, either in number or in overstepping the bounds of freedoms, rights and equalities that black people ought to be a
llowed: racial discord, separation and further alienation.

  White churches that had once received blacks, as long as they were small in number and sat in separate pews, now told them they were not welcome at all, now told them to get churches of their own.

  The same was happening in white hotels, restaurants, and theaters. Blacks were no longer able to get service. A separate YMCA was built to keep black people out of the facilities that white folks used.

  In a climate of rampant anxiety at the increasing black population, efforts were advanced to roll back measures that had been intended to ease racial tensions and prejudice. There was even a proposal to void all marriages that had taken place between “a person of the white or Caucasian race and a person of the negro or black race.”

  Blacks were kept out of the unions and out of all but the most menial and worst-paying jobs: janitors and street sweepers, porters, elevator operators, waiters, and shoe shiners. Blacks were kept on the fringe, largely unemployed, certainly underemployed, not worthy of great concern.

  Black people needed refuge from a world that, according to the New York Freeman, saw them “more as a problem than as a factor in the general weal, with the same desires, passions, hopes, ambitions as other human creatures.”

  These are the conditions and climate that created the despair that created the hope that created Harlem, the city of refuge, the city that became the black mecca.

  In March 1925, the Survey Graphic ran a special issue called Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, where, in an essay simply titled “Harlem,” Alain Locke wrote, “Harlem had the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.”

  Adam Clayton Powell Sr. called Harlem “the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere.”

  Eslanda Robeson said that only blacks belonged in Harlem. “It is,” she said, “a place they can call home.”

  And home was what they needed.

  So they moved to the suburbs.

  Harlem, as a matter of fact, used to be the suburbs.

  That is probably hard to believe, standing where we now stand and seeing the urban decay all around.

  Standing where my father stood, I would have found it hard to imagine, had I tried, that Harlem had ever been anything but what it was that day, and certainly not a pastoral community of prosperous farmers, colonial families, peace and tranquillity. Marshes and meadows covered the district of Harlem then, clean streams, goats and geese and cows. Eventually, though, the land played out. The farms were abandoned, many of the great estates were sold at public auction, property values plunged.

  As longtime residents moved out, Irish immigrants moved in. They built shanties and shacks and squatted on abandoned lands that had formerly been prosperous estates. Those who could buy property did so cheaply. They built small houses. Harlem was fast becoming a residential community. And new prosperity was on its way.

  Harlem was still the country, a rural outing for city dwellers, a weekend in the countryside where downtowners could get away from New York and take afternoon strolls along the quiet lanes. The aristocratic horsey set would ride their sulkies through Central Park to exercise their trotters on Harlem Lane—long before it became St. Nicholas Avenue—and people wanting to avoid the frenzy of New York City began moving to Harlem to escape the noise and the crowds of the city and to get away from the next wave of immigrants who had newly arrived.

  They couldn’t escape for long.

  Once the population of New York City had passed the one-million mark, pastoral Harlem’s days were numbered. There was nowhere else for a city built on an island to grow, nowhere to put all those people except for them to move north.

  Finally in 1873 Harlem was annexed to New York City. Three elevated train lines were extended into Harlem, and Harlem quickly became the scene of wild speculation and development. Nearly all the houses that exist still today in Harlem were built in the frenzy that followed.

  Land changed hands often and quickly. Speculators made fortunes buying up Harlem real estate and selling it at tremendous profit to developers who built houses on the land and sold them quickly to reinvest the profit in still more buildings.

  Prices soared. Rents in the new buildings were so high that only the wealthy could afford them. Harlem was poised to become an upper-class community.

  Blacks of course still lived in the area. They had always lived in the area. They had been of course among the earliest settlers—if indeed slaves can be called settlers. They had tended the farms, worked the estates, and built the roads. The original wagon road connecting Harlem with the community farther down the island had in fact been built by black slaves. They even had their own burial ground.

  With the end of slavery, blacks stayed in Harlem and began to spread across the area. They were squatters on abandoned lands long before the Irish immigrants were, or they farmed their own land, or they worked as servants in the mansions of the wealthy who were moving to Harlem. There was never a time when blacks did not live here.

  But early in the twentieth century, when the second wave of real estate development collapsed, so many blacks suddenly began to appear in Harlem that white residents seemed to forget that substantial numbers of blacks had always lived here. These old white residents were shocked and dismayed and none too happy at the changes happening to their neighborhood.

  Nowadays when we think of Harlem, we never think of it as their neighborhood. It is hard to remember that white folks once lived here too. It is hard to imagine a time when Harlem wasn’t predominantly black—or even entirely black. It is so easy to look and see the world and think that everything is as everything always has been, possibly even that things will be forever as they are now.

  When you stand on a street corner in Harlem you can easily get the feeling too that Harlem has always been this way and will always be this way, that Harlem has always been poor and desperate and dangerous, and that these things have always been equated somehow with being black.

  It is easy to forget how disadvantage and atrophy happen, easy to forget how much we help them along.

  The land speculation in Harlem continued unabated. Property values were inflated beyond the barriers of reality, yet new houses continued to be built. A new subway line had been proposed. It was supposed to make Harlem even more attractive, even more popular, justifying all the construction and the crazy high prices of rents and properties.

  Then all at once the bubble burst. The subway that was proposed and then promised didn’t arrive on time; and in anticipation of its arrival, too many buildings had been built. Harlem was awash in vacant apartments.

  Now suddenly rents were too high, and landlords were forced into the dramatic action of lowering rents and allowing blacks to fill the vacancies. The boom was over. Blacks in large numbers began moving to Harlem.

  Before Harlem turned into the fringe area it became, blacks in New York City had lived primarily in another fringe neighborhood, the Tenderloin—midtown Manhattan, along the West Side. Now with the construction of the new Pennsylvania Station came the destruction of many all-black tenement blocks. Displaced and now at last offered decent housing for the very first time, blacks moved in droves uptown to Harlem.

  Landlords and speculators had been facing financial ruin, many of them. Some offered their apartments to blacks. Others used the threat of black tenants moving in to force whites in the neighborhood to buy the vacant properties. Still others allowed black tenants in order to further lower property values so they could buy buildings cheaply, often at half price, and then put in more black tenants once they discovered that blacks were willing to pay a premium to rent in Harlem.

  Philip Payton found an opportunity here. New York’s black population had been steadily growing and needed housing. And Payton knew how willing they would be to sacrifice and pinch pennies in order to live in such an exclusive area as Harlem. Payton, a black man, assured white landlords an income by leasing their apartmen
t buildings. He then turned around and rented apartments to black tenants—at a 10 percent premium, of course.

  Payton got control of his first building when two landlords were locked in a dispute. To get even with the other, one of the angry landlords turned his building over to Payton. Payton filled it with black families.

  This was the beginning. Harlem was becoming a black community. Harlem would soon be the mecca it became. Harlem was turning first into a ghetto; then it turned into a slum. The slum is what we know of Harlem today.

  We think we know this place because it is so much in our consciousness. We think we know Harlem because of the rumors we’ve heard, the movies we’ve seen, the stories we’ve read. We think we know this place because it is so deeply embedded in our cultural idiom that the very mention of Harlem conjures an image—perhaps not always the same image, but an image and a connotation. We think we are so familiar with this place that we know its history, its beginnings and endings, and the failings it has come to symbolize. We think of Harlem now, many of us, if we think of it at all, as we think perhaps of a dying fruit tree, or of a well gone dry. And we think we know—not that we care—but we think we know what happened.

  There was a time—not so very long ago but still a long time ago, and perhaps we’ve forgotten—but there was a time after Harlem became the ghetto and while it was still the mecca when Harlem was a celebration.

  It was a time so much like today and yet so unlike today. It was an era when white was white and black was black and Harlem meant nothing but blackness and the whites of this world did not want to live anywhere near the blacks of this world. It was this separate world of blackness that Harlem came to represent. It became a magnet for blacks the world over—certainly for blacks, but it became for a time a magnet for whites as well. It was dark—yes! forever dark, this place—but the darkness was of mystery, not so much of danger. Harlem was on the move, on the rise, full of life and hope. Harlem was fun.