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History of Harlem

History of Harlem Number 1: “The New Negro” Alain Locke edited a volume of critical essays and literature entitled the New Negro. In it, Locke heralded a spiritual awakening within the Afro-American community. It was manifested by a creative outburst of art, music and literature as well as by a new mood of self-confidence and self-consciousness within that community. The center of this explosion was located in Harlem. Famous personalities such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson James Weldon Johnson, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong either moved to Harlem or visited it frequently in order to participate in the vigorous cultural exchange, which took place there. The artist of the “Negro Renaissance”, as important as they might be themselves, were merely symbolic of the new life which was electrifying the Afro-American community. This new life was also evident in the large urban centers of the North and particularly in Harlem. The New Negro was less polite and more aggressive; he was also more self reliant and less dependent on pity and charity. This change, however, did not occur suddenly. The passive, well-behaved Negro, content to stay in hip place, had largely been a myth. In part, he had been the product of a guilt-ridden white stereotype, which found this myth comforting. The Negro himself had also contributed to this fiction by his custom of social mimicry, his habit of appearing to fill the role, which whited expected of him. By the end of slavery, however, a spirit of individuality had been growing within the Negro consciousness. The opportunity for industrial employment in the North which had resulted from war and from the slow down in European immigration along with the increase of racism and segregation in the South combined to open the way for the development of the growing spirit of determination. Langston Hughes wrote through out the 1930’ and the 1940’s, speaking for the poor and homeless black people who suffered during the Great Depression. He wrote of their daily lives in America’s cities, of their anger and their loves. Black people loved reading his works and hearing him read his poems at public presentations all over the country. To them he was “Harlem’s Poet”. The Harlem that Langston Hughes loved and where he lived most of his life was an exciting place. This newly developed suburb of New York City was planned, laid out, and built almost too fast. Harlem had broad boulevards, beautiful town houses, and exclusive apartment buildings. After the war the combination of the Great Migration, the mix of cultures in Harlem, and a newfound sense of black unity and confidence produced a great burst of creativity. During the Harlem Renaissance, intellectual dialogue, literacy and artistic creation, blues and jazz, dance and musical theater came together and flowered as never before. Europe studied piano and violin in his youth and about 1904 settled in New York City, where he directed musical comedies and, in 1910, he helped organize the Clef Club, a union of African-American musicians. The 125-member Clef Club orchestra that he conducted at Carnegie Hall featured an extraordinary instrumentation, including 47 mandolins and bandores and 27 harp-guitars. Europe's Society Orchestra was probably the first African-American band to record, as early as 1913, when it offered fast versions of ragtime works, typically in 2/4 metre, with urgent rhythmic momentum. His band also regularly accompanied the popular white dance team of Irene and Vernon Castle, who popularized the fox-trot and a dance in 5/4 metre, to scores by Europe and his collaborator, Ford Dabney. During World War I Europe led the all-black 369th Infantry band, which toured France; it was noted for its syncopations and expressive colors. The band was nicknamed the "Hell Fighters" and was making a triumphal postwar tour of the United States when Europe was killed by one of his musicians. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 29, 1908. At the age of six months he moved with his parents to New York City, where his minister father developed the century-old Abyssinian Baptist Church into one of the largest congregations in the United States. After attending public schools and the City College of New York, Powell graduated with a B.A. degree from Colgate University in 1930, and received a M.A. degree in religious education from Columbia University in 1931. While the assistant minister and business manager of the Abyssinian Church in 1930, Powell used picket lines and mass meetings to demand reforms at Harlem Hospital, which had dismissed five black doctors from its staff because of their race. Beginning in 1932, he administered an extensive church-sponsored relief program providing food, clothing and temporary jobs for thousands of Harlem's homeless and unemployed. It was during these Depression years that Powell established himself as a charismatic and successful civil rights leader as he organized mass meetings, rent strikes and public campaigns that forced restaurants, retail stores, bus lines, utilities, telephone companies, Harlem Hospital and the 1939 World's Fair either to hire or to begin promoting black employees. These impressive victories secured for Powell an extraordinarily loyal support from Harlem residents who would stand behind him almost to the very end of his controversial career. Powell succeeded his father as pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1936. In 1941 he was elected as an independent to the New York City Council. He was publisher and editor of The People's Voice, a weekly newspaper, from 1941 to 1945. In 1942 he became a member of the New York State Office of Price Administration, serving until 1944, and of the Manhattan Civilian Defense, serving until 1945. In 1944 he was elected to Congress, representing New York's newly created Twenty-second (later Eighteenth) District. Powell became a member of the Seventy-ninth Congress on January 3, 1945. During his first term he served on the Indian Affairs, Invalid Pensions and Labor committees. In 1947 he took a seat on the Education and Labor Committee and sat on the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs from 1955 to 1961. Soon after his arrival in Washington, Powell challenged the informal regulations forbidding black representatives from using Capitol facilities reserved for members only. Following the lead of Oscar De Priest, Powell took black constituents to dine with him in the "whites only" House restaurant and ordered his staff to eat there whether they were hungry or not. On the House floor, Powell clashed almost immediately with one of the chamber's most notorious segregationists, John E. Rankin of Mississippi, and introduced legislation to outlaw lynching and the poll tax and to ban discrimination in the armed forces, housing, employment and transportation. he attached an anti-discrimination clause to so many pieces of legislation that the rider became known as the Powell Amendment. Powell attended the landmark Bandung Conference of Africa and Asian nations in 1955. Upon his return he urged President Eisenhower and other American policy makers to take a firm stand against colonialism and pay greater attention to the emerging Third World. The following year he broke party ranks and supported Eisenhower for reelection, charging that the Democratic platform's civil rights plank was too weak. In 1958 he survived a trial for income tax evasion, which ended in a hung jury, and a determined but unsuccessful effort by New York's Tammany Hall machine to oust him in the Democratic primary. In 1961 Powell became chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor and began the most productive and satisfying period of his congressional career. The Committee approved over fifty measures authorizing federal programs for minimum wage increases, education and training for the deaf, school lunches, vocational training, student loans and standards for wages and work hours, as well as aid to elementary and secondary education and public libraries.This legislation comprised much of the social policy of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. By the middle of the decade, however, Powell was under attack from both long-time enemies and committee members, who expressed dismay with his erratic management of the committee budget, numerous trips abroad at public expense, absenteeism and self-imposed exile from his district where his refusal to pay a slander judgment made him subject to arrest. On January 9, 1967, the House Democratic Caucus stripped Powell of his committee chairmanship. Furthermore, the full House refused to seat him until completion of an investigation by the Judiciary Committee. The following month, the committee recommended that Powell be censured, fined, and deprived of seniority, but on March 1 the House rejected these proposals and voted 307 to 116, to exclude him from the Ninetieth Congress. Powell won a special election on April 11, 1967, to fill the vacancy caused by his exclusion, but did not take his seat. He was reelected to a twelfth term in the regular November contest, but the House voted to deny him his seniority. Powell declined to take his seat when the Ninety-first Congress convened in January 1969. In June 1969 the Supreme Court ruled that the House had acted unconstitutionally when it excluded him from the Ninetieth Congress, and Powell finally returned to his seat albeit without his twenty-two years' seniority. He unsuccessfully south renomination in the June 1970 primary and failed to get on the ballot as an independent. Powell retired as minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1971 and died in Miami on April 4, 1972. The NAACP was founded in New York City in 1909. It didn't try to get legislation passed, but had a tremendous belief in the Constitution, and studied the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments very thoroughly. The 13th ended slavery, the 14th said you couldn't be discriminated because of prior status in your life, and the 15th guaranteed the right to vote. The NAACP was more liberal in its early years, when W.E.B. Du Bois was head of it. It became more conservative, which is one of the reasons they got rid of Du Bois in 1934. They were scared of him. At that time, the Communists were trying to get deeply involved with the NAACP; they joined, and wanted to develop policy. The members of the NAACP were liberal in the way that middle-class people called themselves liberal. Everybody who wanted to express themselves had to be a member of the NAACP. You didn't have too many other organizations. There wasn't an Urban League in Northern California until the mid-1940s. The NAACP was founded in New York City in 1909. It didn't try to get legislation passed, but had a tremendous belief in the Constitution, and studied the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments very thoroughly. The 13th ended slavery, the 14th said you couldn't be discriminated because of prior status in your life, and the 15th guaranteed the right to vote. Since the beginning, the NAACP has conducted legal wars in its long and costly fight to bring full citizenship to black Americans, which were so stoutly denied and blocked by a well-entrenched white society through legal and pseudo-legal methods, simply because white people held the power. Affirmative action means nothing more than equality of opportunity, a term the NAACP has often used. The 369th Infantry Regiment of New York, perhaps was the most celebrated group of black soldiers in World War I. This unit, popularly known as the Harlem Hellfighters, had been organized in the fall of 1916 as part of the National Guard, and consisted mostly of men from Harlem and other black neighborhoods of New York City. These soldiers received their fist lessons in warfare in the city’s streets before moving to a South Carolina training camp in October 1917. The local white population lost no time in making sure that these big city Northern blacks knew their place in the south, subjecting them to a number of humiliating racist outrages. Faced with the angry reactions of the black recruits, the War Department decided to ship them to France as quickly as possible, in order to avoid further incidents. Therefore, after a few more weeks of training at camps in New Jersey and Long Island, the unit set sail in December 1917. Marcus Garvey advocated a philosophy of race redemption. He said that blacks needed a nation of their own where they could demonstrate their abilities and develop their talents. He believed that every people should have its own country. The white man had Europe, and the black man should have Africa. Race redemption did not mean that all blacks must return to Africa. However, when there was a prosperous, independent African nation, blacks throughout the world would be treated with respect. Although Garvey had overnight, created the largest mass organization in Afro-American history, it crumbled almost as quickly as it had been built. The movement had been overly dependent on his personality. However, Garvey cannot be dismissed so easily. Although his movement disintegrated rapidly, the interest in black identity and black pride, which he had sparked, lingered on. Lacking a structure within which to operate, it was not very obvious to the external observer. Nevertheless, his ideas have clearly provided the spawning ground from which more recent organizations have developed. Madame C.J. Walker was born in 1867 to Owen and Minerva Breedlove, former slaves. She married C.J. Walker at fourteen and had a daughter, L'Aliea. While working as a laundress Walker nurtured her dream of making a preparation that would "improve" the texture of African women's hair. She set out with $1.25 and plenty of determination to become America's first self-made woman millionaire. She developed a line of cosmetics and hair care products especially for African-American women. She sold her wares door to door at first, then established a company based in Indianapolis, Indiana. In Indianapolis she employed thousands of people to manufacture and sell her products all over the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean. Madame Walker moved to Harlem in 1916 and opened an elegant and fully equipped beauty salon. In 1917 she bought another property and built a mansion, where she entertained the rich and famous. Madame Walker was also a human rights activist, and visited the White House as part of a delegation that was petitioning President Woodrow Wilson to make lynching a federal crime. She also traveled around the country promoting her products and speaking out on women's and African-American rights. C.J. Walker died in 1919, leaving her business and her legacy to her daughter, L'Aliea, who continued her work. Southern Migration and West Indian Migration The voluntary black immigration, which occurred during the twentieth century, was a new and unusual phenomenon. Almost all blacks that had previously come to American had been brought in chains. Those who came voluntarily during this century came in spite of their knowledge that racism would confront them. Their awareness of American racism, however, was an abstraction and was only partially understood by them. Nevertheless, they were America as the land of prosperity and opportunity at a time when, for many of them, social and economic conditions in their homeland did not seem promising. While only a few came from Africa itself, except as students staying for a limited period, there was a swelling flow from the West Indies and the entire Caribbean area. The migrants were moved both by forces within the south which pushed them out and by those within the North which pulled them in. On one hand, continuing violence and segregation drove many to leave their homes. When the boll weevil spread across the Southern states like a plague, it wiped out many poor farmers, and it drove them to seek other means of livelihood elsewhere. On the other hand, the war had interrupted the flow of immigrants from Europe into the Northern industrial centers, and at the same time it created the need for even more unskilled labor in the factories. James Weldon Johnson described the West Indian immigrants as being almost totally different from Southern rural Negroes who had moved n to New York City. He said that the West Indians displayed a high intelligence, many having an English common school education, and he noted that there was almost no illiteracy among them. He also said that they were sober minded and had a genius for business enterprise. It has been estimated that one third of the city’s Negro professionals, physicians, dentists, and lawyers, were foreign born. The west Indians had an ethos, which stressed, saving, education, and hard work. The same self-confidence and initiative, which enabled substantial numbers of them to move into professional employment, made others into political radicals. Unaccustomed to the intensity of racial hostility and harassment which they found in America, they reacted with anger. They had not been trained since birth in attitudes of submission and nonresistance. This was the phenomenon, which created Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association. The West Indian community had been gradually merging with the large Afro American society. Minstrelsy the most popular nineteenth-century American vernacular entertainment, featuring white performers mimicking blacks, it reinforced negative stereotypes of African Americans, yet also preserved aspects of black humor and performance style. During the Middle Ages, minstrels were servant-performers who entertained their patrons by playing music, singing, telling stories, juggling, or performing comic antics and buffoonery. In the antebellum United States, the term referred to comic performers, almost always white, who wore blackface makeup - generally burnt cork - and mimicked African Americans. The most popular entertainment of that century, minstrel shows had a powerful impact on American culture; in particular, they served to "codify the public image of blacks as the prototypical Fool or Sambo During the decades before the Civil War, minstrel companies found great success in Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Minstrelsy helped to create misleading 'and highly demeaning' stereotypes of African Americans. Yet it also captured something of the distinctive qualities of African American humor and song, especially during the late nineteenth century, when a number of African American minstrel troupes appeared. Although black minstrel companies were largely trapped by the stereotypes of white minstrelsy, they nonetheless provided an important showcase for black performing talent and served as a springboard for black participation in the twentieth-century entertainment industry. In an atmosphere marked by political acrimony and social tension, minstrelsy had a vital unifying function for white Americans. By constructing an image of happy-go-lucky plantation slaves and irresponsible free black dandies, minstrel shows made light of slavery and emancipation as political issues and denied the human suffering that the institution exacted daily. In addition - much like their medieval counterparts - antebellum minstrels and their absurd antics served not only to entertain, but also to reassure their patrons of their own superiority. By defining blackness so ludicrously, antebellum minstrels constructed a cultural "other" over whom all whites - whether immigrant or native-born, urban or rural, working class or well-to-do - could feel superior. Thus minstrelsy provided indirect but not inconsequential grounds for white social and political unity - at the expense of African Americans After the Reconstruction years, blacks and whites often rode together in the same railway cars, ate in the same restaurants, used the same public facilities, but did not often interact as equals. The emergence of large black communities in urban areas and of a significant black labor force in factories presented a new challenge to white Southerners. They could not control these new communities in the same informal ways they had been able to control rural blacks, who were more directly dependent on white landowners and merchants than their urban counterparts. In the city, blacks and whites were in more direct competition than they had been in the countryside. There was more danger of social mixing. The city, therefore, required different, and more rigidly institutionalized, systems of control. The Jim Crow laws were a response to a new reality that required white supremacy to move to where it would have a rigid legal and institutional basis to retain control over the black population. What had shifted was not their commitment to white supremacy but the things necessary to preserve it. In 1883, The U.S. Supreme Court began to strike down the foundations of the post-Civil War Reconstruction, declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The Court also ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited state governments from discriminating against people because of race but did not restrict private organizations or individuals from doing so. Thus railroads, hotels, theaters, and the like could legally practice segregation. Eventually, the Court also validated state legislation that discriminated against blacks. In 1896 it legitimized the principle of "separate but equal" in its ruling Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court held that separate accommodations did not deprive blacks of equal rights if the accommodations were equal. In 1899, the Court went even further declaring in Cumming v. County Board of Education: Laws establishing separate schools for whites were valid even if they provided no comparable schools for blacks. The high court rulings led to a profusion of Jim Crow laws. By 1914 every Southern state had passed laws that created two separate societies; one black, the other white. Blacks and whites could not ride together in the same railroad cars, sit in the same waiting rooms, use the same washrooms, eat in the same restaurants, or sit in the same theaters. Blacks were denied access to parks, beaches, and picnic areas; they were barred from many hospitals. What had been maintained by custom in the rural South was to be maintained by law in the urban South. Starting in 1915, victories in the Supreme Court began to chip away at the Jim Crow Laws. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court supported the position that a statute in Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to any citizen whose ancestors had not been enfranchised in 1860 (grandfather clause) was unconstitutional. In Buchanan v. Worley(1917), the Court struck down a Louisville, Kentucky, law requiring residential segregation. The first major blow against the Jim Crow system of racial segregation was struck in 1954 by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. This began what is known as the "Civil Rights Movement" and began the end of the Jim Crow Laws. Until the 1930’s, celebrities and gangsters rubbed shoulders at the posh Cotton Club. The club’s owner, "Owney" Madden, was the leader of the notorious Gopher Gang. He turned the Cotton Club into the hottest spot in Harlem, and eventually…. the world! Stars like Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and Ethel Waters, drew crowds of the wealthiest and most influential people of their time. Today, the Cotton Club’s performers and legendary reputation continue to draw visitors from every corner of the globe. American singer, actor, athlete, and civil rights activist. He was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 9, 1898. At Rutgers University he became a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the first black All-American football player; he also graduated from Columbia University law school. As an actor, he scored his first major successes in New York City in 1924, appearing in Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones. His first vocal recital was in 1925 in New York City. A bass-baritone noted for the rich lyric vibrancy of his voice, Robeson became one of the most popular concert artists of his day. At the same time, he continued to be a major actor, appearing on the stage in Black Boy (1926) and Porgy (1928). Critics applauded his Othello. He also appeared in 11 motion pictures, notably Show Boat (1936), in which his singing of "Ol' Man River" was a highlight. Robeson lived in Europe from 1928 until 1939; he became an outspoken friend of the Soviet Union. During the 1950s, his refusal to sign a loyalty oath, his acceptance of the 1952 Stalin Peace Prize, and his militant advocacy of equal rights for American blacks sent his career into decline, and his U.S. passport was revoked for a time. Robeson lived his last decades in seclusion; he died in Philadelphia, on January 23, 1976. His autobiography is Here I Stand (1958). Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7th, 1891 in Eatonville, Florida. Her hometown and her experiences there provided inspiration for several of her novels, including the autobiographical Dust Tracks on the Road. Hurston attended Morgan Academy in Baltimore for high school, and studied afterward at Howard University in Washington, D.C.. From 1925 to 1927 Hurston attended Barnard College, studying anthropology with Dr. Frank Boaz. She subsequently did field research recording the folklore and ways of African Americans, first in Harlem and then throughout the rural South. Her work played a large role in preserving the folk traditions and cultural heritage of African Americans. Hurston was ahead of her time. Her literary activities were influential in bridging the gap between what came to be known as the first and second phases of the Harlem Renaissance. She began writing short stories in the 1920's, but her major acheivements were generally between 1931 and 1943, when she wrote scholarly works on folklore and published six major novels. She was on the vanguard of the modern literary movement. Several of her books won recognition and her stories were published in the leading literary magazines of the times. Her most notable novel was Their Eyes Were Watching God, a classic in American literature. Bibliography:

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