Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?

Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era

Shannon King

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479808960
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

2015 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleWinner of the Anna Julia Cooper/CLR James Award forOutstanding Book in Africana Studies presented by theNational Council for Black Studies Demonstrates how Harlemite’s dynamic fight for their rights and neighborhood raised the black community’s racial consciousness and established Harlem’s legendary political culture In Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?, Shannon King vividly uncovers early twentieth century Harlem as an intersection between the black intellectuals and artists who created the New Negro Renaissance and the working class who found fought daily to combat institutionalized racism and gender discrimination in both Harlem and across the city. New Negro activists, such as Hubert Harrison and Frank Crosswaith, challenged local forms of economic and racial inequality in attempts to breakdown the structural manifestations that upheld them. Insurgent stay-at-home black mothers took negligent landlords to court, complaining to magistrates about the absence of hot water and heat in their apartment buildings. Black men and women, propelling dishes, bricks, and other makeshift weapons from their apartment windows and their rooftops, retaliated against hostile policemen harassing blacks on the streets of Harlem. From the turn of the twentieth century to the Great Depression, black Harlemites mobilized around local issues—such as high rents, jobs, leisure, and police brutality—to make their neighborhood an autonomous black community. In Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?, Shannon King demonstrates how, against all odds, the Harlemite’s dynamic fight for their rights and neighborhood raised the black community’s racial consciousness and established Harlem’s legendary political culture. By the end of the 1920s, Harlem had experience a labor strike, a tenant campaign for affordable rents, and its first race riot. These public forms of protest and discontent represented the dress rehearsal for black mass mobilization in the 1930s and 1940s. By studying blacks' immense investment in community politics, King makes visible the hidden stirrings of a social movement deeply invested in a Black Harlem. Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Is a vibrant story of the shaping of a community during a pivotal time in American History.

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 “a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.”1 Similarly, George Edmund Haynes, cofounder of the National Urban League, envisioned Harlem as an exemplar of interracial comity. In 1921, Haynes contends, “the cosmopolitan atmosphere [of New York City] knows less of color prejudice than probably any other city in the United States.”2 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 neighborhood’s 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 “the most gigantic instance of racial segregation in the United States [was] seen in Harlem.” Miller keenly called into question Johnson’s and Haynes’s 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, “the 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.”3 A year later in late July, Harlem exploded, and New York City witnessed the district’s first race riot.

While Johnson and Haynes endeavored to represent Harlem as an exception, Miller zeroed in on the district’s 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 “border skirmishes.” When Ossian Sweet, a black doctor, dared to defend his home and family in Detroit in 1925, this incident, Miller claimed, was “in no sense different from hundreds of other incidents occurring all over the country, with the exception that it . . . resulted in bloodshed.” Miller’s 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 “as effectively as if by legislative enactment.” This chapter delineates the making of the “Negro Mecca,” and the origins of Harlem’s movement for community rights. I argue that Harlemites’ struggles for community rights emerged from their efforts to build a black metropolis. Before World War I, Harlem’s 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 Harlem’s community-building process, foregrounding local battles on three interconnected and overlapping fronts—housing, 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 “real estate race war” and blacks’ 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. Harlem’s 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 blacks’ efforts to achieve economic autonomy.5 Yet within Harlem’s 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 consumers’ responses to the “white invasion” 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 “Negro primitivism.” With blacks’ 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, Harlem’s array of neighborhood institutions forged a politics of dignity among the black community.6 Before Harlem drew white America’s 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, “remove[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.”7 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 district’s 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 blacks’ 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. Harlem’s civil rights struggles grew out of black consumerism and blacks’ flagrant occupation of public space in Harlem and around the city. Blacks’ consumer expectations collided with whites’ efforts to constrain blacks’ civil rights in theaters, restaurants, and public transportation. Harlem’s civil rights movement emerged from blacks’ 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, blacks’ heightened expectations of the North, coupled with their experiences as privileged consumers in much of Harlem, challenged whites’ denial of their dignity and political rights across the city.

Harlem’s social reform campaign originated from black leaders’ and reformers’ efforts to simultaneously accommodate the expansion of the black population and shape the behavior of blacks in the district’s public amusements. In this way, Harlem community rights reflected not only blacks’ 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 Harlemites’ well-being. Even before the Great Migration, the expansion of the city’s black population had exhausted the black community’s already limited resources. Black institutional churches and social reformers, such as clubwoman Victoria Earle Matthew, mustered their neighborhood resources to attend to the pre–World 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 blacks’ self-help and uplift efforts in the neighborhood as the embodiment of citizenship, black and white reformers tried to demonstrate blacks’ 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 agencies—that is, white-controlled welfare agencies—to 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 City’s claims to liberalism. At the same time, these intraracial and interracial struggles jumpstarted Harlem’s 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.

“Real Estate Race War”: Taking Harlem

“When Negro New Yorkers evaluate their benefactors in their own race,” opined James Weldon Johnson, “they 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.” As Payton remembered, his initial entry into the real estate business occurred when “to ‘get even’ 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.” 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 city’s 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 Harlem’s real estate market was booming by the 1890s. Yet areas distant from transportation and along the waterfront—marshes, garbage dumps, and lots—remained 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 Harlem’s 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

* * *

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. Harlem’s real estate bust presented opportunities for astute black realtors like Payton to benefit from the situation. Alert to Harlem’s collapsed real estate market, Payton exploited the white realtors’ disagreement to secure better housing for blacks. By filling up the apartments, P...