The exhaustive survey work that informs E. Franklin Frazier’s studies of human ecology could only occur at a national scale, as previously envisioned by W. E. B. Du Bois,1 with the institutional reach and heft of the Census Bureau, and even then only once per decade. Not only did the Census Bureau directly investigate African American social life at a level of breadth and depth unimaginable before the twentieth century; the bureau also amassed and made available stores of data that have been studied and interpreted by third-party researchers, including Du Bois and Frazier, working within and beyond higher education. Harlem proved an enticing target for social science research into African American life because its density and its rapid social evolution virtually hypothesized themselves. This means that the Census Bureau’s sometimes arbitrary census tract–level geographic boundaries quite literally shaped how social scientists and other intellectuals came to view Harlem.2
Frazier’s theory of Harlem human ecology—that Harlem’s Negro community developed radially, in concentric circles that were simultaneously less Negro and less dysfunctional as the five zones expanded outward—relied on census tract–level data and thus imagined Harlem as internally divided along census tract lines. For instance, Zone I, at the intersection of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, differs greatly from Zone V, at Harlem’s outer periphery (encompassing Central Park in the south and Washington Heights in the north). Frazier points to a wide array of demographic data (residential type, marriage rate, fertility, and so forth) to demonstrate that the outer zones are more stable, in terms of traditional family life, than the inner core of Harlem. Thus, the familiar “city within a city” refrain—the “Harlem Negro community,” Frazier reports, “has assumed the same pattern of zones as a self-contained city”—takes on a dissonant undertone.3
There’s a noteworthy problem with Frazier’s geospatial analysis of the Harlem situation: his concentric zones are largely a product of the imagination, almost as fictional as one of Rudolph Fisher’s sociological short stories. Frazier first introduced the concept of Harlem zones in 1937 in his “Negro Harlem: An Ecological Study,” published in the American Journal of Sociology, the field’s oldest and most influential outlet. To be more precise, there are at least two problems with Frazier’s approach. First, and of little consequence, the table that complements the concentric zone map draws at different times from two distinct Manhattan census tracts (CTs 216 and 228) to supply data for the centermost part of the map, Zone I. (In 1910, the table reports Zone I data from CT 216 and in 1930 from CT 228.) The mismatched data skew the results, but only slightly; the overall trend, which shows a rapid shift in the Harlem population from white to black, remains indisputable.
A second, more impactful problem requires further explanation. Frazier admits that his “radial expansion” map “may be represented ideally by drawing concentric circles” around census tract 228; he also hints at a departure from the ideal by supplying angular lines to indicate the divide between census tracts. In a footnote to the 1937 article, one not reprinted in his later books, Frazier further clarifies that “statistical data from the federal census and other sources on the five zones are based on data for the census tracts which are included more or less in five zones as represented ideally on Map I. Data on Zone I are drawn from statistics on one census tract, No. 228; while data on the other four zones are based on statistics on the successive groups of census tracts encircling this central census tract.”4 Frazier’s verbal slipperiness (“more or less,” “ideally”) has its visual analog: the map’s right-angled lines hew much more closely to the concentric circles than do the actual census tract boundaries (see fig. 5.6).
The census tracts that Frazier identifies as Harlem in a decade’s worth of social analysis—the same census tracts, more or less, that have consistently supplied social chroniclers, including this one, with empirical data about the neighborhood—follow the gridiron contours of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 (see fig. 5.1). To the south, Central Park supplies one “natural” landmark, so that 110th Street demarcates Zone IV from Zone V, and 98th Street serves as the line between Harlem and the rest of Manhattan. North of this line are census tracts 168 and 185; south of the line are tracts 160 and 181. The Harlem River delineates Harlem’s eastern and northern extents. The Hudson River represents Harlem’s western extent, although Frazier repeatedly explains away statistical anomalies by referring to human institutions (such as the fashionable homes that line Riverside Drive) impeding the westward spread of the African American population.
A more faithful visual rendering of the census tracts applied to Frazier’s zones would more closely resemble boxes surrounding boxes—concentric squares—rather than circles radiating outward from a central point. The urban grid and the census tracts that conform to its chessboard pattern allow Frazier to conceive of relevant comparative geographies, but the grid fails to supply his perfect circles. Zone I / census tract 228 looks instead like a chessboard square, and its neighboring zones would consist of the chessboard squares that enclose the first. Even so, Frazier’s concentric circle zones proved a powerful sociological concept, particularly during the 1970s, when the now-familiar consensus view of the Harlem ghetto took firm hold in wider discussions of residential segregation. The sharply angled reality of census tract boundaries, particularly in Manhattan, did not fit precisely Frazier’s portrayal of human ecology in Harlem, but it did enable the emergence of census tract–level data partitioning.
The census tract was born in 1906, when Walter Laidlaw, according to an official Census Bureau history in 1937, “became convinced that in order to study neighborhoods it was absolutely necessary to have population data for local areas smaller than boroughs or wards.”5 In his policy manifesto, “Federation Districts and a Suggestion for a Convenient and Scientific City Map System” (1906), Laidlaw decries mutable political boundaries and presents instead a case for fixed geospatial borders: “The scientific sociological study of Greater New York requires a ‘dead language’ boundary for tabulations. Federation respectfully suggests a scheme which does away both with ward and Assembly district outlines, and which can be permanent.” Laidlaw proposed dividing each square mile of city geography into “quarter sections of 160 acres,” and from this division the “nomenclature would then be (a) Blocks, (b) Quarter Sections, (c) Quarters, (d) Borough Sections, (e) Burroughs.”6 The right-angled grid of Manhattan would provide the basic building block of geosocial analysis. Later in 1906, Laidlaw took his idea to Washington, where he convinced Walter C. Hunt, the chief of the Division of Population at the Census Bureau, to deploy census tracts (known at the time as “districts”) in New York City.
Thus the scheme set out by Laidlaw formed the blueprint for the census tract system first deployed in select parts of New York City in 1910, although the Census Bureau reported ward-level rather than tract-level data that year, leaving it to interested individuals and institutions to compile data for each of the 708 tracts.7 (Of these, 415 tracts covering tenement areas conformed to Laidlaw’s vision; the remainder consisted of legacy districts of varying size.) Laidlaw undertook the compiling effort himself, editing a two-volume, 800-page report underwritten with $60,000 from the New York Federation of Churches and Christian Workers, where Laidlaw served as executive secretary.8
To gear up for the next census in 1920, Laidlaw drew tracts for the entire city, 3,427 in all (later reduced to 2,463 when the Census Bureau adopted the boundaries). He also founded the Cities Census Committee to organize and support census compilation efforts in New York; of the $65,000 raised by the committee, Laidlaw contributed $5,000 in personal funds.9 In 1932, the committee published its Population of the City of New York, 1890–1930, a volume compiled and edited by Laidlaw and much used by social scientists and historians. Because of Laidlaw’s efforts and his many connections among statisticians and government bureaucrats, together with the example of his editorial scholarship, the census tract system quickly spread to other cities and today spans the entire United States.
It is worth reflecting for a moment on why Laidlaw wished to study geospatial demographic patterns in New York City to begin with. Born in Ontario, Canada, and educated at the University of Toronto (MA) and New York University (BA and PhD), Laidlaw was an ordained Presbyterian minister in the Scottish tradition and the founding executive secretary of the New York Federation, a Protestant interdenominational association. Throughout its early existence, the group saw as its mission the sociological study of the New York City population to provide Christian congregations with strategic guidance. On the Federation’s behalf, Laidlaw analyzed neighborhood population changes and predicted congregational viability based on these demographic shifts.
The group’s research, regularly published in its journal, Federation, reveals a dynamic understanding of ethnic population change but a static understanding of ethnic religious identity. For example, if Scottish American families abandoned one particular neighborhood in favor of other parts of the city, then the Federation would recommend that the Reformed Presbyterian church consider relocation; if the same neighborhood became home to large numbers of Anglo-American families, then the prospects for an Episcopal church were deemed more promising, whether or not the families attended an Episcopal church across town. When, at the dawn of the twentieth century, white Moravians felt crowded out of their church by large numbers of black Moravian immigrants from the West Indies, the Federation suggested a suitable location on West Sixty-Third Street for a new, all-black Third Moravian Church of Manhattan. (A legacy Negro population cluster can be identified next to Central Park in fig. 3.1. This same church relocated to Harlem in 1954.) In a sense, the Federation functioned as an independent census bureau and interethnic arbiter for the city’s religious institutions. Its motto, “Civic Evangelism,” closely linked sociological knowledge with Christian service. Early Federation journal issues are brimming with statistical maps and population tables. Laidlaw, who led the group’s survey teams, interpreted the results, and wrote most of the copy for Federation, stood at the center of the New York Federation’s geosocial investigations.
Laidlaw clearly announces his belief in the interchangeability of ethnic and religious identities—and the geopolitical consequences of ethnic religiosity—in his Federation article “Religious Belief and Race Suicide” (1903). Unraveling data from Federation neighborhood surveys, Laidlaw compares family size by religious affiliation: “The average number of children in the Protestant families is 1.85, in the Roman Catholic 2.03, and in the Hebrew 2.54”; he further observes that “only 16.6 per cent. of the Hebrews are without children, whereas 28.3 per cent. of the Protestant are without children.” From these figures, Laidlaw concludes that “Hebrews are freer from race suicide than Roman Catholics, Protestants or Agnostics”; sociological objectivity notwithstanding, his choice of phrase, borrowed from Theodore Roosevelt among others, indicates a negative assessment of the situation facing his fellow Protestants. Religious belief, Laidlaw adds, must be understood as “a contributing factor” to race suicide, “and President Roosevelt is a true Protestant, even if the honors, in the race suicide situation, lie with Hebrews more than with Christians, and with Protestants less than with Roman Catholics.” Indeed, Laidlaw worries that Protestants (unlike Jews and Catholics) appear not to be heeding the Old Testament injunction to “be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the earth.”10 For Laidlaw, geospatial demography shines a bright light on a society that has fallen from the path of God.
Laidlaw was neither more nor less nativist than his era, and the census tracts that he conceived inevitably served interests that reacted to rapid social change with generosity or parsimony of human compassion. The census tract is thus a curious symptom of modern American identity scholarship and politics: it renders with surefire bureaucratic efficiency the tension inherent in multicultural (rather than strictly federalist) readings of the Great Seal motto, E pluribus unum. Out of many persons, the census tract gives us a shorthand version of one geographically defined social experience. The assembly of data into discrete census tracts has been instrumental in the comparative analysis of social attributes by race and ethnicity, particularly as these emerge from a context of segregated housing; as the sociologist Donald L. Foley pointed out at midcentury, “the research most directly promoted [by census tract data] has been that dealing with the differential characteristics of urban residential subareas within large cities.”11
The census tract gave sociology the primary tool with which scholars could explore and illustrate human ecology, defined in 1926 by Frazier’s Chicago School mentor Robert E. Park as “not man, but the community; not man’s relation to the earth which he inhabits, but his relation to other men.” Manhattan census tract 228, to return to our Zone I example, represents in Frazier’s estimate the ultimate constellation of Harlem experiences. The census tract yields geographic data that insists upon comparative analysis deploying variables deemed important enough by the Census Bureau to collect and report. The variables have evolved over time, but as we have already seen, questions of racial identity and privilege loom large in our nation’s bureaucratic history. And just as individuals sometimes bear the burden of representing a larger social identity, so too do census tracts. As Park observes, “Every local group exhibits a more or less definite constellation of the individual units that compose it.”12 As the spatial repository of the most complete set of readily available census data, the census tract is the part favored to represent the whole. Easily manipulated and tested for statistical reliability, census tract data remains the gold standard of demographic analysis.13
Census tract geography, as we see in Frazier’s theory of concentric zones, has a tendency to accrue symbolic value as well. Harlem Renaissance literary history sides with Frazier in this regard. Rudolph Fisher explores the function of Manhattan’s urban grid in imposing a kind of racial identity onto the exact same Zone I geography in his short story about intraracial violence, “Blades of Steel,” first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1927.
The story begins with a curious reference to the urban grid’s too convenient symbolism: “Negro Harlem’s three broad highways form the letter H, Lenox and Seventh Avenues running parallel northward, united a little above their midpoints by east-and-west 135th Streets.” According to Fisher’s clinically detached narrator, on Seventh Avenue there can be found a “promenade of high-toned dickties and strivers”; Lenox Avenue, on the other hand, is home to “unperfumed ‘rats.’” The two social types come together, literally and symbolically, at the centermost point within Frazier’s concentric circles: “These two highways, frontiers of the opposed extreme of dark-skinned social life, are separated by an intermediate any-man’s land, across which they communicate chiefly by way of 135th Street. Accordingly 135th Street is the heart and soul of black Harlem; it is common ground; the natural scene of unusual contacts; a region that disregards class. It neutralizes, equilibrates, binds, rescues union out of diversity.” The passage virtually groans under the weight of clichéd figures of speech, drawn from the lingo of westward expansion (“frontiers,” “any-man’s land”), pop cultural notions of selfless patriotism and racial essentialism (“heart and soul”), chemistry (“neutralizes, equilibrates, binds”), and of course Great Seal sloganeering (“union out of diversity”). The narrator makes equally painful exertions to render the story’s two principal characters as absurd visual opposites; they are a cartoonish, albino “caricature” of “African ancestry” on the one hand, and a figure of absolute black with a “silhouette-like clean-cutness” on the other hand. The story features stock characters, settings (a barbershop and a 135th Street dance hall), Harlem slang, and even a “‘low-down’ orchestra,” virtually the same contents that previously garnered disapproval for Fisher’s friend and collaborator Carl Van Vechten.14
As one character in Van Vechten’s infamous novel declares, “Nigger Heaven! That’s what Harlem is. We sit in our places in the gallery of this New York theatre and watch the white world sitting down below in the good seats in the orchestra.”15 The spatial metaphor, which compares residential segregation in Manhattan to Jim Crow theater seating, allowed Van Vechten to project elements of class difference onto the black/white divide between Harlem and the rest of New York City, but all demographic subtlety was lost on most of his readers, then as now. Spatial metaphors tend toward bluntness. Harlem was at times known as “Little Africa,” an exotic but easily grasped locale on a par with “Little Italy” or “Chinatown.” Harlem itself has been understood primarily in terms of dissociative distance from the rest of New York City, and the census tract gives us plentiful data with which to tabulate and objectify the difference.
Human ecology as first conceived by Park invested heavily in notions of freedom of movement. As Park explained, “The fact that every individual is capable of movement in space insures him an experience that is private and peculiar to himself”; movement in space gives each of us our own, irreproducible identity. Similarly, Park understood human ecology to be shaped by social and cultural commerce that is mutually constitutive and evolutionary in nature. Anticipating the sociological concept transculturation, Park observed that social “communication involves not a translation of energies, such as seems to take place between individual social units . . . but rather communication involves a transformation in the individuals who thus communicate. And this transformation goes on unceasingly with the accumulation of individual experiences in individual minds.”16 Seen in this light, the census tract–level data that inform most studies of human ecology, including Frazier’s seminal work in the field of Harlem studies, fails utterly to account for that which makes us most human. By fixing identity data points (race, gender, marital status, literacy, and the list goes on) in time and space, social chroniclers tend to inflict on individuals the same kind of too-certain, one-dimensional status that besets so many Harlem Renaissance fictional characters: Jake Brown, Helga Crane, Max Disher, Emma Lou Morgan, Angela Murray, ’Liza Jane Taylor. . . . And any census of Harlem Renaissance writers would uncover the recurring theme of individuals forced by American racial discourse into limited professional options and burdensome social responsibilities.
I offer no messianic pleas for a postracial understanding of the Harlem Renaissance; to do so would be to ignore five centuries’ worth of discursive insistence—in law, in medicine, in politics, in culture—that race was a (if not the) crux of human social identity. But this book arrives at a moment that is animated by ongoing discussions of the racial nomenclature that will determine how some 335 million Americans define themselves on the 2020 census.17 Throughout this book I have insisted on the value of census history as a lens through which we might view African American literary culture. Now is the time to turn the lens around and view social practices with all the nuance and generosity of a great work of literary art.