AMERICA’S FIRST HERO
The first American soldier in World War I to receive the Croix de Guerre with star and palm was Sergeant Henry Johnson from Albany, New York. The battle in which he fought became known as the “Battle of Henry Johnson.” On May 14, 1918, Johnson was on outpost guard duty with Private Needham Roberts when a raiding party of twenty Germans attacked. Both Johnson and Needham were wounded. After Johnson had fired his last bullet, he attacked the Germans with the butt end of his rifle and a bolo knife to free Roberts. Together, Johnson and Roberts killed four Germans, wounded several more, and held their post as the rest fled.
World War II recruitment poster celebrating World War I hero Sergeant Henry Johnson.
The sense in the community was that African Americans, newly empowered, were at the beginning of a new age of freedom and justice. In his editorial in the Crisis, Du Bois wrote:
The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
Make way for democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.
Unfortunately, this optimism was short-lived. By summertime, white retaliation was in full swing. Over the next seven months more than twenty-five major race riots would occur across the nation and eighty-three African Americans would be lynched. The Ku Klux Klan, revived in 1916, would hold more than 200 meetings from Indiana to New England to Florida. In disgust, James Weldon Johnson dubbed the summer of 1919 the “Red Summer” in response to all the blood that was spilled.
“These boys have been fine soldiers here, and if they ever get back from France, I’m big enough to lick any man who don’t give ’em a square deal.”
— An African-American Sergeant from the 371st
Infantry Regiment, upon leaving Camp Jackson, South Carolina
Doughboy, Edward Arlington Harrison, circa 1926.
MAY 10, 1919 CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
A white sailor shoots an African-American civilian to death. Unlike the other 25 race riots that occurred this year, Charleston officials with the help of the Marines restore order overnight with only two blacks killed and seventeen wounded; seven sailors and one policeman are injured.
JUNE, 1919 ELLISVILLE, MISSISSIPPI
A white mob fatally wounds an alleged rapist named John Hartfield as he flees through a cane field. A local doctor keeps Hartfield alive for the lynching the next day. Town newspapers announce the time and place. Three thousand people gather at the appointed tree. Hartfield is hanged, burned, and shot. Governor Theodore Bilbo refuses to stop the action, saying, “Nobody can keep the inevitable from happening.”
JULY, 1919 LONGVIEW, TEXAS
The National Negro Business League chapter in town persuades black farmers to bypass the local white growers and negotiate directly with buyers in Galveston. The body of a young African-American man is found outside town stripped nude and shot dead; the latest issue of the Chicago Defender arrives in town with a detailed account of the murder. White townspeople quickly conclude that a local African-American teacher and doctor are the authors of the article. On July 10, both men are beaten and ordered to leave town by sundown. The two men defy the order. When a mob gathers in front of the doctor’s house, more than 150 shots are fired. At least one black and four whites are killed and many are wounded. Order is restored finally by the state militia and Texas rangers after a number of houses are burned and the doctor’s father is savagely murdered.
JULY, 1919 WASHINGTON, D.C.
Spurred on by the Washington Post, a white mob is encouraged to “clean up” the city by ridding it of blacks. Like in Longview, blacks fight back. When the Secretary of War finally orders 2,000 infantry to restore order, more than 100 people have been injured and 6 have been killed.
JULY, 1919 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
For five days blacks and whites fight back and forth across Wentworth Avenue, the street dividing the white blue-collar stockyard neighborhoods from the Black Belt. When the riot ends, 15 whites and 23 blacks are dead, 537 people are wounded, and more than 1,000 are homeless.
Poet Claude McKay memorialized the bloody season of 1919 in the following poem, which was published later that year in the white magazine Liberator.
IF WE MUST DIE
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in the inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In Vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
—CLAUDE MCKAY
Armistice Day at Lenox Ave. and 134th St., 1919.
BLACK METROPOLIS
THE RISE OF HARLEM, 1900–1920
HARLEM WINE
This is not water running here,
These thick rebellious streams
That hurtle flesh and bone past fear
Down alleyways of dreams.
This is a wine that must flow on
Not caring how or where,
So it has ways to flow upon
Where song is in the air.
So it can woo an artful flute
With loose, elastic lips,
Its measurements of joy compute
With blithe, ecstatic hips.
— COUNTEE CULLEN
BLACK BOHEMIA
BY THE TIME W. E. B. Du Bois moved to Harlem in 1911, and James Weldon Johnson followed in 1914, Harlem was a neighborhood in bold transition. The neighborhood above 110th Street in Manhattan was far from the sleepy white upper-class enclave it was at the turn of the century. Yet Harlem was also a long way from the throbbing black metropolis it was destined to become.
In 1911, the center of black life was still downtown in a section of Manhattan called Black Bohemia. Ranging from Twenty-seventh to Fifty-third Streets on the West Side of Manhattan, Black Bohemia was little more than a ghetto. The streets were tightly packed with boarding houses and tenements. The streets and sidewalks were choked with wagons and pedestrians.
At this time the average black worker earned about seven dollars a week. A tiny four-room apartment in Black Bohemia rented for twenty dollars a month, about two to five dollars more than in white neighborhoods. Obviously, this left little for a family to live on. To make matters worse, Black Bohemia had become the location of the city’s brothels and gambling dens. White landlords preferred these “sporting life” tenants because they demanded fewer, if any, improvements than respectable workers, and they were willing to pay even higher rents. By the second decade of the century, rent gouging in Black Bohemia had reached such a crisis that it had become the butt of jokes by black comedians and was featured in a classic black vaudeville song: “Rufus Johnson Brown, what you gwine do when de rent comes roun’?”
Harlem, by contrast, was a paradise of almost unimaginable splendor. Whatever it took to escape the squalor of midtown Manhattan was worth the sacrifice for blacks. The name “Harlem” evoked elegance and distinction. Its streets and avenues were broad, well paved, and tree-lined, and its buildings were aristocratic apartment houses and beautiful brownstone homes — “finished in high-style,” as one turn-of-the-centu
ry advertisement trumpeted. This was a far cry from Black Bohemia’s claustrophobic, windowless tenements.
BLACK MAIN STREET, CIRCA 1900–1910
West Fifty-third Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues was black New York’s main street. Almost all of the community’s major institutions were located here: political clubs, Mount Olivet Baptist Church, St. Marks Methodist Episcopal Church, St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic Church, the major black fraternal societies, two black hotels, the Negro YMCA, and the offices of many of the 42 black physicians and 26 black lawyers who serviced the 60,000 African Americans of New York City.
“Now I started at the bottom, and I stays righ t there, don’t seem like I’m gonna get nowhere.”
— lyrics from a blues song
Black tenement homes in the San Juan Hill district, in the West 60s; subway construction, Lenox Ave. and 113th St., 1901.
Harlem earned its grand reputation in the 1880s and 1890s, when developers envisioned this sanctuary on the northern edge of Manhattan as a white, upper-class haven from the bustle and clatter of downtown. In 1880 the elevated railroad was built along Eighth Avenue. This mass transportation opened up the west side of Harlem. Next, the subway was scheduled to be built under Lenox Avenue on the East Side by 1904. With subway trains traveling at forty miles per hour, the eight-mile ride to City Hall became a matter of minutes instead of hours on a streetcar. This news caused a sudden development boom. Speculators invested an enormous amount of capital in Harlem, and real estate values skyrocketed as investors anticipated huge profits. These investors could just imagine thousands of white, upper-middle class commuters unloading from the new subway stations. Unfortunately, too many developers believed the same thing. Harlem quickly became overbuilt years before the completion date of the new subway. By 1902 whole buildings remained unoccupied as they waited for the expected flood of tenants, which would not come for another two years. Facing financial ruin, developers went begging for tenants. At dire times like these, economic necessity can override racial prejudice.
October 27, 1904
The Interborough Rapid Transit subway system was completed to 148th Street and Lenox Avenue. The fare was five cents.
Designed by famous architect Stanford White, Strivers Row, on 138th and 139th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, contained some of the finest apartments and homes in New York City.
INVASION OF HARLEM
WHILE BLACK BOHEMIA in mid-town was bursting well beyond its capacity, a young twenty-four-year-old African American named Philip A. Payton Jr. recognized just how desperate the white owners of empty apartment buildings up in Harlem really were. In 1903 Payton negotiated a deal with the white landlords to lease a few houses on West 134th Street, east of Lenox Avenue. He knew that middle-class blacks would pay almost anything to get out of the overcrowded, crumbling tenements of mid-town, so he offered landlords a rental rate above the depressed real estate price. Then he added a percentage to the rent for himself and was still able to offer apartments that seemed reasonable when compared with the high rents of Black Bohemia.
In a 1912 interview, Payton described how the deal came about:
I was a real estate agent, making a specialty in management of colored tenement property for nearly a year before I actually succeeded in getting a colored tenement to manage. My first opportunity came as a result of a dispute between two landlords in West 134th Street. To ‘get even’ one of them turned his house over to me to fill with colored tenants. I was successful in renting and managing this house, after a time I was able to induce other landlords to . . . give me their houses to manage.
With that first foot in the door, Payton was able to expand the number of properties he managed, first to the west and then across Lenox Avenue. Neither Payton nor the white property owners could have seen what was to come — the wholesale migration of blacks from downtown Manhattan to Harlem. Nor could Payton have imagined the extent of the outrage of whites over a few black families’ moving into that segregated community.
A black family moves into Harlem, about 1905. The apartments in this building are advertised as “For Respectable Colored Families Only.”
“It is no longer necessary for our people to live in small, dingy, stuffy apartments.”
—New York Age, 1906
A newspaper article from the New York Herald, December 24, 1905
NEGROES MOVE INTO HARLEM
An untoward circumstance has been injected into the private-dwelling market in the vicinity of 133rd and 134th Streets. During the last three years the flats in 134th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, that were occupied entirely by white folks, have been captured for occupation by a Negro population. Its presence there has tended also to lend much color to conditions in 133rd and 135th Streets between Lenox and Seventh Avenues.
One Hundred and Thirty-third Street still shows some signs of resistance to the blending of colors in that street, but between Lenox and Seventh Avenues has practically succumbed to the ingress of colored tenants. Nearly all the old dwellings in 134th Street to midway in the block west of Seventh Avenue are occupied by colored tenants, and real estate brokers predict that it is only a matter of time when the entire block, to Eighth Avenue, will be a stronghold of the Negro population.
As a result of the extension of this African colony dwellings in 133rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and in 132nd Street from Lenox to Eighth Avenues, have depreciated from fifteen to twenty per cent in value, especially in the sides of those streets nearest to 134th Street. The cause of the colored influx is inexplicable.
ORIGIN
OF THE
Afro-American Realty Company
THE Afro-American Realty Company recently incorporated under the laws of the State of New York for $500,000 to operate in New York City Real Estate, had its origin in ten men, who over a year ago, joined themselves together, into co-partnership for the above mentioned purpose.They began by taking five year leases on flat houses and renting them to people of their own race.The success that met their efforts by far exceeded the expectation of the most optimistic of the co-partnership. In less than six months they were in control of ten flat houses, with an earning capacity of over $5,000 per annum.
Prejudice of White Owner and Agent Cause of Present Condition.
The reason for the present condition of the colored tenancy in New York City to-day, is because of the race prejudice of the white owner and his white agent. When the owner becomes colored and his agent colored, then there is compelled to come an improvement of the condition.
Race Prejudice Turned into Dollars and Cents.
Race prejudice is a luxury and like all other luxuries, can be made very expensive in New York City, if the Negroes will but answer this call of the Afro-American Realty Company. With a cash capital of $500,000, the Afro-American Realty Company can turn race prejudice into dollars and cents. The very prejudice which has heretofore worked against us can be turned and used to our profit.
Prospectus of Afro-American Realty Co., 1904, organized by Philip A. Payton Jr.
THE REAL ESTATE WAR
AS AFRICAN AMERICANS increasingly found more apartments available, white residents became fearful their neighborhoods would soon be “overrun” by blacks. As a result they organized to choke off the black expansion by forming holding companies to buy the properties adjacent to the black apartment buildings. Likewise, the Hudson Realty Company was created with one mission: to purchase buildings that housed blacks and then to evict them. An organization called the Property Owners Protective Association incorporated another real estate company “to get rid of colored people” and to “prevent Negroes from coming to Harlem to live.” Their president, John G. Taylor, told the Harlem Home News that they would work to make it “impossible for white renegades to borrow any more money for the purpose of backing Negro speculators in their value-destroying ventures.”
Outraged, blacks fought this white resistance every way they could. Payton organized th
e Afro-American Realty Company, capitalized at $500,000 ($9,085,000 in today’s dollars) to buy and lease houses to rent to African-American tenants. Others made it a point of racial pride to buy Harlem property, dispossess whites, and install members of their own race. Influential African Americans in the press and in the church urged people to buy and lease in Harlem to drive the racists out.
“Race prejudice is a luxury and like all other luxuries, can be made very expensive in New York City...”
Still, the whites fought hard to exclude blacks. The New York Indicator, a real estate publication, spoke of the “invasion” of Harlem and suggested that the only fit place for blacks to live was “in some colony in the outskirts of the city, where their transportation and other problems will not inflict injustice and disgust on worthy citizens.”
In 1913 white politicians of Harlem attempted to build a playground on the side of the 18th-century Watt Mansion to encourage white residents to stay. By 1914, however, the mansion had become the location of the Libya Hotel, the first black nightclub in Harlem.
Below, an advertisement to turn the Watt Mansion in Harlem into a white haven. Above, the interior of the Watt Mansion in 1913 after it became the Lybia, Harlem’s first black club.
“If you want the City to acquire this property for a play ground, NOW is the time to act.”
Interior of black tenement, c. 1915.
WHITE FLIGHT
THE PRESSURE APPLIED on the Afro-American Realty Company by such organizations as Property Owners Protective Association made it impossible for the company to survive. The company could not acquire mortgages from banks, and the leases it did have were canceled; the company’s capital alone was not nearly enough to keep it above water. Enraged by the company’s failure, Philip A. Payton Jr. tried to give white Harlem residents a taste of their own medicine. He entered into a partnership with J. C. Thomas, a prosperous black undertaker, to buy two five-story apartment houses, evict the whites, and rent the apartments to black tenants. Another real estate firm was also formed by two salesmen from the Afro-American Realty Company, John E. Nail and Henry C. Parker. Their response to this disenfranchisement was just as aggressive. Nail and Parker Real Estate Company bought a row of five apartment houses and evicted the white tenants. Next, they worked with other African-American groups to buy even more property. St. Philips Protestant Episcopal Church, one of the oldest and richest African-American congregations in New York, bought a row of thirteen apartment houses on 135th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues at a cost of $620,000 ($11,265,400 in today’s dollars). The church then evicted all the white tenants and rented the apartments to blacks.
Harlem Stomp! Page 4