Harlem Stomp!

by Laban Carrick Hill

  Line of children receiving food from nuns.

  By 1930, Harlem had grown more than 600 percent since 1900 to more than 350,000 people, with an average density of 233 persons per acre, compared with 133 per acre for the rest of Manhattan.

  EXODUS

  “WE WERE NO longer in vogue, anyway, we Negroes,” commented Langston Hughes before he left Harlem for his mother’s home in Cleveland in 1931. One year later, Hughes would leave the country to make a film with other black artists in the former U.S.S.R. Though this film was never actually shot, the fact that Hughes and others felt more hope in an uncertain project halfway across the world suggests just how grim America had become for African Americans.

  By 1935, almost no one from the renaissance’s glory days was left in Harlem. The economic fallout from the Depression was the biggest reason for this breakup, but it was not the sole cause. Throughout the renaissance cracks had existed under the surface. These divisions, however, were easily overlooked when the money and recognition were plentiful. Once opportunity disappeared, the artists of the renaissance began to divide more clearly into two camps. The younger artists believed the arts should celebrate blackness in all its variety and be truthful to life, whereas the older, more established ones felt the arts should function as propaganda to uplift the status of African Americans. A defining moment came with the success of Wallace Thurman’s play Harlem. To supporters of black theater groups such as the Krigwa Players, Thurman’s play was like a slap in the face. Harlem celebrated a part of black life — the rent party, with its bootleg liquor, gambling, and erotic dancing — that many of the Talented Tenth would rather have gone unknown to the larger white population. Though these divisions had nothing to do with the Depression, they made it impossible for African Americans to face the economic disaster with a unified front. Consequently, the Harlem Renaissance disintegrated and its participants scattered.

  • Arna Bontemps moved to Nashville to join the faculty of Fisk University.

  • Countee Cullen returned in 1934 to DeWitt Clinton High School in Manhattan, from which he had graduated, to teach French for the rest of his life. Among his students was future writer James Baldwin, who interviewed Cullen for the school newspaper.

  • Aaron Douglas joined Charles Spurgeon Johnson on the faculty at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and remained there until his death.

  • W. E. B. Du Bois stopped publishing literary works and struggled to keep the Crisis afloat by refusing his salary.

  • Jessie Fauset left her editorship at the Crisis, married an insurance broker, and became a housewife in Brooklyn.

  • Zora Neale Hurston returned to the South, where she collected folktales for Mules and Men (1935) and wrote one of her finest novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

  • James Weldon Johnson joined the faculty at Fisk University in Nashville. • Alain Locke increasingly turned his gaze toward Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he was a faculty member.

  • Claude McKay lived in poverty and worked for the WPA during the Depression.

  • Wallace Thurman, battling tuberculosis and alcoholism, died in poverty in 1934.

  • Jean Toomer became a follower of the religious mystic Gurdjieff.

  NEGROES

  Oh, Lawd, I dones forgot Harlem!

  Say, you colored folks, hungry a long time in 135th Street — they got swell music at the Waldorf-Astoria. It sure is a mighty nice place to shake hips in, too. There’s dancing after supper in a big warm room. It’s cold as hell on Lenox Avenue. All you’ve had all day is a cup of coffee. Your pawnshop overcoat’s a ragged banner on your hungry frame. You know, downtown folks are just crazy about Paul Robeson! maybe they’ll like you, too, black mob from Harlem. Drop in at the Waldorf this afternoon for tea. Stay for dinner. Give Park Avenue a log of darkie color — free for nothing! Ask the junior Leaguers to sing a spiritual for you. They probably know ’em better than you do — and their lips won’t be so chapped with cold after they step out of their closed cars in undercover driveways.

  Hallelujah! Undercover driveways!

  Ma soul’s a witness for de Waldorf-Astoria!

  (A thousand nigger section-hands keep the roadbeds smooth, so investments in railroads pay ladies with diamond necklaces staring at Cert murals.)

  Thank God A-mighty!

  (And a million niggers bend their backs on rubber plantations, for rich behinds to ride on thick tires to the Theatre Guild tonight.)

  Ma soul’s a witness!

  (And here we stand, shivering in the cold, in Harlem.)

  Glory be to God–

  De Waldorf-Astoria’s open!

  — LANGSTON HUGHES, New Masses, December 1931

  HARLEM RIOT, 1935

  WITH MANY OF the Talented Tenth gone, Harlem became a slum populated predominantly by the unskilled and undereducated, who were unemployed or underemployed. At the same time, blacks from the South continued to come North because the conditions on the farms were even worse. In this increasingly overcrowded community the streets of Harlem became a powder keg ready to explode. The igniting spark would come in March of 1935. With more than fifty percent of the African Americans in Harlem receiving unemployment relief, frustration and bitterness had reached an all-time high. Along 125th Street, the stores that had catered to blacks refused to hire them. When a youth attempted to steal a ten-cent pocketknife and was arrested, the response was incendiary.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES, MARCH 21, 1935

  TROOPS GUARD HARLEM: MAYOR PLEADS FOR PEACE

  Crowds of restless Negro residents and thousands of curious white visitors thronged Harlem’s sidewalks last night under the sharp watch of more than 500 policemen, but there were no new outbreaks such as kept the district in turmoil all Tuesday night and early yesterday morning. Of the 100 or more white men and Negroes who were shot, stabbed, clubbed or stoned during the rioting of Tuesday night, only a handful remained in Harlem hospitals. These however were on the critical list. Up to last night there was only one death as a result of the rioting. While the police seemed certain that they had enough men in the district to put down any new uprising of the hoodlum element that looted stores and broke more than 300 shopwindows during the rioting, the Merchants Association of Harlem telegraphed to Governor Lehman that the police force was inadequate and made a plea for “military assistance.”

  LEGACY

  THE IMPORTANCE OF the Harlem Renaissance cannot be underestimated. By the end of the 1930s, jazz had clearly become America’s music, while the jitterbug, a Savoy Ballroom invention, had taken the country by storm and changed couples dancing. Young African-American writers who had learned their craft from renaissance authors began to make a name for themselves. Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and James Baldwin would all come out of Harlem in the coming decades to write some of America’s greatest books — Wright’s Native Son, Walker’s The Color Purple, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Brooks’s Annie Allen, and Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. “Black is Beautiful,” a phrase with roots in the Harlem Renaissance, would become a rallying cry in the civil rights movement decades later. In the end, the seeds sown during the Harlem Renaissance are still bearing fruit, not just for African Americans, but for all Americans.

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  CREDITS

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material.

  Harold Ober Associates Incorporated: First published in New Masses.

  Copyright © 1931 by Langston Hughes: “Negroes.”

  Greenwood Publishing Group Inc., Westport, CT: “Harlem Jive.”

  Children’s Press/Franklin Watts, a division of Scholastic Inc.: “Ten Basic Elements of Jazz” from The First Book of Jazz by Langston Hughes.

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Pages ii, 111, 135, Courtesy of Culver Pictures

  Pages vi, 93 bottom, 94, 95, 97 left and right, 98-99, Courtesy of Frank Driggs

  Pages vii top and center, 4, 7, 13, 17, 21 top and bottom, 26, 44, 47 48 top and bottom, 50, 51, 58 top, 64, 65, 66 right, 67, 71 left and right, 72 left and right, 73 left and right, 86, 89, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 120, 121 right, 143, 146, 147, Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

  Pages vii bottom, 114, 123 left and right, Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum

  Page viii, Courtesy of Emmet Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tildon Foundations

  Pages ix, 6 bottom left, 9, 18, 32, 35 right, 39 right and left, 43, 58 bottom, 81, 83, 126, 128, 132, Courtesy of Photograph and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations