1
The Making of the Negro Mecca
Harlem and the Struggle for Community Rights
Throughout the 1920s, black leaders in New York City and across the nation debated the cultural and intellectual significance of Harlem. As the largest urban black neighborhood in the North, ensconced in the most cosmopolitan and diverse city in the nation, Harlem, opined James Weldon Johnson, was âa city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.â1 Similarly, George Edmund Haynes, cofounder of the National Urban League, envisioned Harlem as an exemplar of interracial comity. In 1921, Haynes contends, âthe cosmopolitan atmosphere [of New York City] knows less of color prejudice than probably any other city in the United States.â2 While Johnson and Haynes were certainly propagandists for the exceptionalism of Harlem during the early twenties, there seemed to be some truth to these claims. In the aftermath of a global conflict and in the midst of a string of race riots punctuating black districts in the urban North, the absence of a race riot in the city since 1900 as well as the neighborhoodâs burgeoning culture made Harlem the model of race relations in black America.
However, in 1927, Kelly Miller, sociologist and dean of Howard University, observed that âthe most gigantic instance of racial segregation in the United States [was] seen in Harlem.â Miller keenly called into question Johnsonâs and Haynesâs picturesque depiction of Harlem, spotlighting the conspicuity of racial segregation, and the generally blurred line between de facto segregation and de jure segregation in the North. As he noted, âthe tradition and practice of New York State is against any form of racial discrimination by law, and yet this process has gone on and still continues as effectively as if by legislative enactment.â3 A year later in late July, Harlem exploded, and New York City witnessed the districtâs first race riot.
While Johnson and Haynes endeavored to represent Harlem as an exception, Miller zeroed in on the districtâs commonality with other black districts undergoing small and large-scale interracial conflict in the urban North. He also explained the rise of racial consciousness across the nation, contending that residential segregation incited âborder skirmishes.â When Ossian Sweet, a black doctor, dared to defend his home and family in Detroit in 1925, this incident, Miller claimed, was âin no sense different from hundreds of other incidents occurring all over the country, with the exception that it . . . resulted in bloodshed.â Millerâs focus on interracial conflicts around the country sheds light on the widespread battles over residential and public space across suburban and urban areas in the North and especially on the emergence of black politics from interracial strife at the local level.4
As Miller asserted, New York City was not exceptional. White supremacy and racial segregation thrived in the city âas effectively as if by legislative enactment.â This chapter delineates the making of the âNegro Mecca,â and the origins of Harlemâs movement for community rights. I argue that Harlemitesâ struggles for community rights emerged from their efforts to build a black metropolis. Before World War I, Harlemâs black community underwent significant institutional development; through the mobilization of their economic and cultural resources, blacks aspired to claim the neighborhood of Harlem as their very own, stirring white resistance in the emergent black district and sundry areas in the city. By the early 1920s, Harlem unequivocally belonged to blacks. Harlemites expected their rights as members of the community to be acknowledged, and clamorously demanded racial equality and neighborhood respectability on that basis. Arranged thematically, this chapter focuses on Harlemâs community-building process, foregrounding local battles on three interconnected and overlapping frontsâhousing, civil rights, and social reform; each battleground constitutes a different part of one story, the origins of Harlem community rights. While the chapter encompasses the period from 1900 to the Great Depression, the moment before the Great Migration is especially significant; at that time, blacks used their institutional resources to strengthen the campaign for housing, erase racial segregation and violence, and provide services to the ever-growing black population. Thus prior to, and in concert with, the arrival of A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, and other New Negro intellectuals and activists, Harlemites had already begun organizing the community and leveraging their institutional resources to propel the community building process. As subsequent chapters will show, New Negro community activists, organizationally and rhetorically, were often in dialogue with these earlier, but foundational, struggles for community rights.
The chapter begins with the âreal estate race warâ and blacksâ search for housing in Harlem in the aftermath of the 1900 race riot. Over the course of roughly two decades, a network of black realtors, black churches, and black tenants took advantage of market conditions and intraracial tensions among white homeowners and renters to claim residential space in Harlem. This campaign for housing, waged from San Juan Hill and Harlem, was the first grassroots battle in Harlem. Harlemâs early political development derived partly from religious and secular institutions transplanted from older black enclaves and partly from recently developed institutions blacks established in their new environment in Harlem. Without the presence and mobilizing efforts of these long-standing institutions in San Juan Hill and other black neighborhoods, blacks might have neither sustained the movement to Harlem nor claimed a significant portion of its residential neighborhood before World War I.
As blacks settled into Harlem, they began building secular and spiritual institutions to satisfy the needs of the burgeoning community. Throughout the community-building process, black leaders asserted that black entrepreneurialism and racial consumer loyalty were the fulcra of the black community. Black Harlem, like other black metropolises in the North and the South, attempted to establish a separate economy; this form of black nationalism, influenced by Booker T. Washington, represented blacksâ efforts to achieve economic autonomy.5 Yet within Harlemâs marketplace, white proprietors also competed for and catered to black consumers. Harlemites primarily experienced the black metropolis as consumers, for many of them chose the variety of services and options that white proprietors offered them over those offered by black businesses. So while Harlem was a black metropolis, the creation of economic autonomy eluded Harlemites. Situating the community-building process in the period before World War I provides the cultural context for understanding black consumersâ responses to the âwhite invasionâ of Harlem in the twenties. As I argue in chapter 4, during the heyday of the Prohibition era, white and black proprietors catered to the flood of white pleasure-seekers bustling in Harlem for âNegro primitivism.â With blacksâ status as preferred consumers challenged by the presence of whites, black Harlemites began to question the notion that Harlem, indeed, belonged to the black community.
Nonetheless, Harlemâs array of neighborhood institutions forged a politics of dignity among the black community.6 Before Harlem drew white Americaâs attention in the 1920s, blacks had created semi-autonomous spaces that contributed to their sense of community belonging. These sites of relative geographical and imagined separateness were protective spaces where blacks, as historian Lynne Feldman notes, âremove[d] themselves physically and psychologically from the broader society . . . [and] constructed a community that allowed them to temporarily ignore the hostilities of the outside world.â7 Black institutions, therefore, protected the dignity of blacks, and fostered the expectation that they should be treated fairly and equitably inside and outside of Harlem. The districtâs leisure and pleasure resorts were important cultural and economic sites for Harlemites to cultivate political identities that challenged conventional notions of race, gender, and respectability in urban space. Harlem, as a site of sociability, work, and commerce, privileged blacks who reveled in the array of diversions that the metropolis offered them.8 This politics of dignity undergirded blacksâ everyday resistance in public places outside the safety of their community.
Beyond the neighborhood of Harlem, white proprietors rejected black consumers, creating a tension between black aspirations and white endeavors to circumscribe their civil rights. As historian Robin D. G. Kelley and others have demonstrated, public places were often sites of contestation and politicization. Harlemâs civil rights struggles grew out of black consumerism and blacksâ flagrant occupation of public space in Harlem and around the city. Blacksâ consumer expectations collided with whitesâ efforts to constrain blacksâ civil rights in theaters, restaurants, and public transportation. Harlemâs civil rights movement emerged from blacksâ everyday responses to de facto segregation rather than from the efforts of civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909). Despite being headquartered in New York City, the NAACP played a marginal role in local civil rights matters. The widespread and deep-rooted racism blacks faced outside of Harlem contributed to making the black district a refuge for all blacks. Yet Harlem was no racial utopia. Blacks regularly endured unfair treatment and segregation in Harlem, especially in the chain stores along 125th Street that were less dependent upon local black patronage throughout the late 1920s. Nonetheless, blacksâ heightened expectations of the North, coupled with their experiences as privileged consumers in much of Harlem, challenged whitesâ denial of their dignity and political rights across the city.
Harlemâs social reform campaign originated from black leadersâ and reformersâ efforts to simultaneously accommodate the expansion of the black population and shape the behavior of blacks in the districtâs public amusements. In this way, Harlem community rights reflected not only blacksâ demands for safe housing, economic autonomy, and civil rights, but also social reform, which often took the form of neighborhood respectability and discipline. Civic-minded blacks waged an uphill battle against black consumption of films, alcohol, and other forms of pleasure-seeking activities in Harlem. Black reformers and journalists were also concerned about Harlemitesâ well-being. Even before the Great Migration, the expansion of the cityâs black population had exhausted the black communityâs already limited resources. Black institutional churches and social reformers, such as clubwoman Victoria Earle Matthew, mustered their neighborhood resources to attend to the preâWorld War migration. Black reformers tirelessly delivered services to and provided training programs for blacks, but their uplift strategies could go only so far.
By 1911, an interracial organization, the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, later renamed the National Urban League, formed to prepare blacks for urban life in the North. Social reform, in this sense, meant preparing migrants for modernity and to be citizens. Migration to the North, therefore, was only the first step to citizenship. Citizenship had to be embodied. By employing a citizenship discourse, which conceptualized blacksâ self-help and uplift efforts in the neighborhood as the embodiment of citizenship, black and white reformers tried to demonstrate blacksâ civic fitness. The league also played an integral role in transforming Harlem into a mobilized community. Through its cooperative efforts, the league created a network of neighborhood and city agencies responsive to the needs of the black community. The league hoped to persuade private and public social agenciesâthat is, white-controlled welfare agenciesâto invest in the black community, to employ trained black social workers in their agencies to effect change from the inside, and particularly to open their doors to black clients.
These individual and collectives efforts for better housing, community building, civil rights, and social reform challenged New York Cityâs claims to liberalism. At the same time, these intraracial and interracial struggles jumpstarted Harlemâs movement for community rights. As a haven from anti-black racism, and a cultural space of racial restoration, Harlem was not only the place where blacks lived but also the place where they felt most human, which, in turn, bolstered their claims upon Harlem and reinvigorated their struggles to realize their community rights.
âReal Estate Race Warâ: Taking Harlem
âWhen Negro New Yorkers evaluate their benefactors in their own race,â opined James Weldon Johnson, âthey must find that not many have done more than Phil Payton, for much of what has made Harlem the intellectual and artistic capital of the Negro world is in good part due to this fundamental advantage.â As Payton remembered, his initial entry into the real estate business occurred when âto âget evenâ one of them [white homeowners] turned his house over to me to fill with colored tenants. I was successful in rending and managing this house, and after a time I was able to induce other landlords to . . . give me their house[s] to manage.â The dispute among white landlords foreshadowed increasing disunity among white Harlemites, as blacks rapidly secured housing in the district during the first decade of the twentieth century. Only thirty years before, Harlem had been an inaccessible suburb inhabited by affluent whites. The only blacks living in Harlem then worked as domestics in the homes of wealthy whites. Structural changes in cityâs residential districts and the real estate bust in Harlem precipitated the economic conditions wherein blacks could compete for and eventually claim real estate in Harlem. While Payton certainly jumpstarted the migration to Harlem, the real estate race war was won by the combined efforts of black tenants, black realtors, the New York Age, and black churches.9
During the 1870s, urban development in the city dislocated black enclaves living in the Tenderloin district. The construction of Pennsylvania Station forced blacks to leave the Tenderloin, destroying entire residential blocks. Between 1878 and 1881, three lines of elevated railroads were built as far north as 129th Street. As speculators purchased and resold property, builders bought land and constructed houses.10 Harlemâs real estate market was booming by the 1890s. Yet areas distant from transportation and along the waterfrontâmarshes, garbage dumps, and lotsâremained noticeably undeveloped. In the years from 1898 to 1904, speculators and developers purchased and developed these areas, initiating a new wave of building. In West Harlemâs wide tree-lined streets, builders constructed luxurious apartment buildings north of Central Park. By 1905 the elegantly designed buildings, with spacious rooms and wide windows, were mostly vacant. Over-speculation had inflated land and housing prices in proportion to the real value of the property. In the same year, financial institutions stopped issuing loans to both speculators and building companies and foreclosed mortgaged properties. Misjudging the timing for the completion of the subway, builders had hastily constructed buildings four and five years in advance. Speculators had built too many apartments and charged prices, ranging from thirty-five to forty-five dollars per month, that few New Yorkers could afford. As a result, landlords who were desperate to draw in tenants reduced rents, as well as offered a few months rent free to would-be tenants.11
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Born on February 27, 1876, in Westfield, Massachusetts, Philip A. Payton, Jr., was the second of four children whose father was a barber, and mother was a hairdresser. He arrived in New York in 1899, and, after working at various jobs in 1900, he established a real estate office at 67 West 134th Street. At the same time, a string of white mob attacks on black districts, high rents, and housing congestion were forcing black New Yorkers to search for safer neighborhoods and affordable dwellings. In the late nineteenth century, the majority of blacks lived either in the Tenderloin district, from Twenty-Third to Forty-Second Streets between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, or in the San Juan Hill area, from Fifty-Ninth Street to the upper Sixties, between Amsterdam and West End Avenues. Harlemâs real estate bust presented opportunities for astute black realtors like Payton to benefit from the situation. Alert to Harlemâs collapsed real estate market, Payton exploited the white realtorsâ disagreement to secure better housing for blacks. By filling up the apartments, P...