Harlem

8
“THE KINGDOM OF CULTURE”

Harlem’s Renaissance Comes of Age

On October 14, 1919, a Harlemite named George Tyler burst into the Universal Negro Improvement Society offices at 56 West 135th Street and overpowered Marcus Garvey’s secretary. Shouting that the UNIA owed him $25, Tyler pulled a pistol and shot Garvey. The Harlem Renaissance might have died then and there had Tyler’s aim been better, but Garvey was only slightly injured. Bleeding from his leg and forehead, he helped police pursue Tyler in a madcap chase through Harlem. Garvey, whose moment had arrived two and a half months earlier, when he began holding nightly meetings of the Universal Negro Improvement Society at Liberty Hall—a squat, dilapidated basement with room for six thousand at 114 West 138th Street—portrayed the assassination attempt in portentous terms. His survival was proof of his divine mission, he claimed, as was the fact that the assailant, who had supposedly been hired by the U.S. district attorney at the behest of the UNIA’s enemies, killed himself while awaiting trial. Given what we now know about the scale of public and private efforts to bring down Garvey, the accusations don’t seem so preposterous. Then again, maybe Garvey planned it all himself.

Historians may argue about when the New Negro movement became the Harlem Renaissance, but they all agree that by the end of World War I something new was happening uptown, and it wasn’t just Prohibition, which was an economic godsend, at least in the short run. The seeds of political and economic change that Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, and so many others had sown were resulting in a cultural harvest that would include the poems of Langston Hughes, the songs of Duke Ellington, the vocal recitals of Paul Robeson, the films of Oscar Micheaux, and the photographs of James Van Der Zee. However dire economic conditions might have been in the tenements along the side streets, Harlem was becoming the “joy spot of America,” according to Billboard magazine. The godfather of the New Negro movement, Alain Locke, boasted that Seventh Avenue was home to “more style, life, variety and novelty than can be observed in any single length of thorofare in the country.” All of the strutting and striving, Locke announced, was the “renewed race spirit” at work, a joyful reinvestment in an ancient, African inheritance that suddenly seemed both totally modern and absolutely American.

The name “Harlem Renaissance” was slow to come into common usage, perhaps because uptown Manhattan took such a long time to become the mecca of the New Negro. The weeklong celebration—the Times noted that “they don’t do things by halves in Harlem”—marking the extension of West 125th Street to the Hudson River in late 1920 was all but closed to uptown’s blacks. For years to come, Negroes were denied service as customers on 125th Street, and kept out of stores by Irish bouncers. It wasn’t until the mid-1920s that black Harlem reached the once fancy neighborhoods above West 145th Street and below West 125th Street. Even then, most of the African-Americans, some newly arrived from the American South or the West Indies, some uptowners for generations, who occupied those brownstone blocks were anything but rich. Long before the stock market crash, black Harlem had become a community in crisis, leading the nation in poverty, crime, overcrowding, unemployment, juvenile delinquency, malnutrition, and infant and maternal mortality. Such conditions provoked a variety of impassioned political responses. A new generation of leaders was out every day on the stepladders and editorial pages, but their struggle with the ironies and contradictions of being men and women who happened to be black often descended into crude, essentialist thinking about race. How could the questions posed by the integrationist Crisis, the secular bible of black America, or by mainstream figures such as the forbidding Adam Clayton Powell, whipsawed by the competing demands of economic advance and moral uplift, compare with Garvey’s bold answers and boisterous parades?

Many Harlemites believed that culture could redeem conditions, but in practice this meant white slummers prowling the neighborhood’s hundreds of nightclubs—many of them closed to blacks—looking for gin and genius, as Hubert Harrison put it. White publishers haunting rent parties looking for New Negro authors were more earnest, but the man and woman on the street were working too hard to pay much attention to the latest developments in black literary modernism. They did make the time for the stage shows that came to Harlem’s theaters, where performers were still wrestling with the distressingly fertile conventions of blackface minstrelsy that had ruled black culture in America for generations. Even as Albert Einstein came to Morningside Heights in 1921 to announce that time was the fourth dimension, down in the Harlem Valley jazz musicians were turning ragtime into blues and jazz, to the joy and alarm of the culture at large. Was Harlem in the 1920s a “foretaste of paradise,” as the novelist Arna Bontemps put it, or was it what Claude McKay called a “cultured hell”? Perhaps it was both.

W.E.B. Du Bois believed that “Talented Tenthers” like the Wrights would lead all of Negro America into a better future. But the divide between the tiny black upper class and the enormous black working class seemed just as insurmountable as the “color line” that Du Bois so accurately identified as the key problem of the era. Labor demand remained strong in New York City after World War I because of a roaring economy and continuing restrictions on “nonwhite” immigration, but Harlemites didn’t fully share in the boom, typically finding work only at the lowest rungs of the economy. Getting a job as a postal clerk, Pullman porter, or elevator operator was a stroke of fortune. White employers refused to hire blacks for any jobs that involved customer service. Meanwhile, difficulty in securing business loans and finding landlords who would rent commercial space to Negroes meant that Harlem’s Colored Merchants Association counted only seventeen affiliated stores by the end of the decade. This was not a matter of simple antiblack sentiment, however, since American-born blacks were considered by employers, black and white, to be less desirable as employees than West Indians. Job ads often specified “West Indian preferred,” which made for tensions among blacks, who already had plenty of problems with their Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighbors.

A more complex set of rules governed relations between blacks and Puerto Ricans, who were mostly white and Catholic but often less than welcome at Catholic churches. Stickball games at Young Devil’s Field, on East 115th Street between Madison and Park avenues, saw the Irish and Italians for once on the same team when they faced the “Spanish,” as the Puerto Ricans were called. Encounters between these groups weren’t always so civilized. In the summer of 1926 police got a tip that a group of Puerto Rican teenagers was planning to invade Lenox Avenue and West 115th Street as a defensive measure against harassment. Sure enough, on the evening of July 26, two dozen Puerto Rican youths armed with big sticks showed up on Lenox Avenue in parade formation. The police scattered the group and all but three sixteen-year-olds escaped. Retaliation wasn’t long in coming. Two days later, an armed West Harlem mob, apparently Negro and Irish thugs hired by Jewish merchants, descended on Puerto Rican East Harlem, resulting in fifty injuries. The new racial realities predicted by the prophets of the uptown renaissance weren’t going to be much of an improvement on the old ones, it seemed.

The Great Migration generation had come from the American South, the West Indies, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean to take advantage of Harlem’s modern housing stock, wide and pleasant boulevards, plentiful parks, and better schools, not to mention improved economic conditions. Both Adam Clayton Powell of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and W. W. Brown of the Metropolitan Baptist Church made “Buy Property” a central theme of their sermons, a strategy drawn straight from the gospel of Booker T. Washington. But racial segregation in the housing market still stood in the way. Striver’s Row, which had gotten off to a poor start back in 1893, when the slowdown in the housing market caught the developers with only 9 of 149 units filled, and forced the sale of the rest of the complex at bargain prices, but only to whites, was desegregated only after the end of World War I, attracting the likes of the singer Ethel Waters, the architect Vertner Tandy, the boxer Harry “The Black Panther” Wills, and the alderman Charles H. Roberts. But Striver’s Row was also home to Harlemites who “strived like hell to pay the rent and taxes,” in the words of James P. Johnson. Astor Row, as West 130th Street between Lenox and Fifth avenues was known, was desegregated around the same time, but it was limited to the tiny Negro aristocracy. As the black belt spread north of West 145th Street, west of Seventh Avenue, east of Fifth Avenue, and south of 125th Street, more and more buildings bore signs that read “Just Opened for Colored.” All too often, that meant “Only for Colored,” which white residents interpreted as “run for your lives.” But even after the Harlem Renaissance had arrived, blacks were still barred from buildings in Sugar Hill—the neighborhood overlooking the Harlem Valley, including the old Harlem Heights (now called Hamilton Heights) and Washington Heights (which then referred to everything north of West 145th Street)—with their uniformed doormen, expensive mahogany fixtures, modern plumbing, and electric refrigerators.

One of the few classy uptown addresses open to moneyed black strivers was the brand-new Paul Laurence Dunbar complex, the earliest experiment in planned social housing uptown. Located between Seventh Avenue and Eighth Avenue, along West 149th and West 150th streets, this cooperative complex consisted of six six-story buildings built in 1926 by John D. Rockefeller and included a day-care center and Harlem’s first and only black bank—this at a time when Chicago had several black financial institutions. The Dunbar complex, which refused to accept members of “the sporting fraternity, daughters of joy, [or] the criminal elements,” quickly sold out, but the Dunbar apartments were an exception. As a result of continuing racial restrictions, most blacks packed themselves into squalid tenements or fast-deteriorating single-family row houses subdivided into a dozen or more apartments. On many blocks, stoops were removed from row houses to make room for churches, barbershops, beauty parlors, offices, and funeral homes. As early as 1920 the New York Herald and Sun was complaining that “among these people the limit has been reached—both as to their financial ability to pay and as to the number of people that may be packed into a given space.” Five years later, Manhattan’s population density of 223 people per acre was dwarfed by Harlem’s 336 people per acre, which made it one of the most densely populated places on earth, five times as crowded as black Chicago.

New Negroes had been paying more for less when it came to housing since before the turn of the century, and during the 1920s things got even worse. The average rent for Negroes in Harlem was $56 a month, about half of their take-home pay, while whites paid about $32 per month for nicer apartments on better blocks, even as they brought home higher salaries, according to the Urban League. The New York Age reported that it wasn’t just white landlords but black ones as well who, in a time-honored tradition, took advantage of low vacancy rates. More than one in four black families took in lodgers to meet rising rents, compared to about one in nine white families. Still, demand for housing remained so strong that Harlemites rented out their beds, floors, bathtubs, coal bins, and basements. Acquaintances working different shifts even rented a single bed together and took turns, a practice known as “hot bedding” or “hot sheeting.”

Faced with such economic problems as high rents, Harlemites turned to cultural solutions, inventing a new genre of music at all-night rent parties, where tenants charged as many as a hundred revelers 10 cents to come in—25 cents or more on Thursdays, known as Kitchen Mechanics night because domestics customarily took Fridays off. Those who were serious about making money this way even printed up announcements on cards that they would leave in apartment lobbies or elevators. These invitations, which had a pride of place in Langston Hughes’s collection of Harlemiana, offer priceless insights into life uptown in the 1920s.

Shake it and break it. Hang it on the
Wall, sling it out the window, and
Catch it before it falls at
A SOCIAL WHIST PARTY
Given by
Jane Doe
2 E. 133rd St. Apt. I
Saturday Evening
March 16, 1929
Music by Texas Slim Refreshments

These gatherings, also known as struts, shouts, jumps, or parlor socials, featured fried chicken, pigs’ feet, chitlins, and greens—food so delicious, the saying went, “it could make you slap your mama.” Even more persuasive was the gin made in the bathtub or the quarter pints of corn liquor known as “shorties” that were on offer. Some hostesses replaced the regular lightbulbs with red ones and brought in prostitutes. But it was the music that made rent parties popular. The piano “ticklers” who had developed the style known as Harlem stride in the years before World War I at uptown clubs and cabarets now found themselves in demand in private homes, where a looser, more individualistic style emerged. The pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith, a staple of the earliest clubs of black Harlem, became the most popular of the rent party performers, even as he packed crowds into the Garden of Joy, an outdoor club located on an empty lot at Seventh Avenue near West 139th Street, and then at the recently opened Capitol Palace, a block away at 575 Lenox Avenue. The most virtuosic of the rent party pianists was James P. Johnson, who was born in New Jersey in 1891 and settled in New York in 1919, where he quickly became one of the most celebrated exponents of the uptown stride style—his piano roll recording of “The Harlem Strut” quickly became a classic. Ticklers such as Luckey Roberts, Richard “Abba-Labba” McLean, Corky Williams, Beetle Henderson, and Thad “Snowball” Wilson, who could play only in the key of B-natural, were also rent party regulars. They all started the evening with warm-up chords and arpeggios and spent the rest of the night moving through a variety of black and white tunes—“Thou Swell” by Rodgers and Hart was a favorite—showing off a roiling, pumping left hand that strummed the rhythm and an agile, darting right hand that tickled out the melody, climaxing just before sunrise with a hot rag. As day broke the music coasted into a slow drag, and revelers did the Monkey Hunch, a dance that showed how exhausted they were. Not all of the guests were black, and not all of them were even adults: it was only years later that the hosts of one party realized that the wide-eyed youth from the neighborhood sitting cross-legged by the piano had been a local named George Gershwin.

None of the rent party ticklers swung harder than Thomas “Fats” Waller, who was born in 1904 at 107 West 134th Street, which makes him one of the very first New Negroes who was also a native Harlemite. Waller’s risqué musical humor made him a national star, but in the years before World War I he was most well known for his size. At a time when many of his neighbors weren’t getting enough food, the Waller family ate too well. Waller’s bed-ridden mother, who considered her children’s extra girth a point of pride, was indulgent at meal times, but she was otherwise protective, letting them out of the house only to go to school or work. Waller saw another Harlem as a delivery boy for a fancy Jewish delicatessen on 125th Street. His mother wanted him to become a preacher, but the boy was more attracted to music, and as soon as he was old enough he used to sneak out to shows at the Lafayette Theatre. Eventually, the Wallers got a piano, bought by Waller’s brother, Lawrence, who served in the Harlem Hellfighters. Waller’s first professional work as a musician consisted of Saturday afternoon concerts for schoolchildren at the Crescent Theatre. Just across the street, the organist who accompanied films at the Lincoln Theatre let Waller perform during intermissions, and eventually he was hired to play the Wurlitzer there full-time. It was at the Lincoln that Waller developed his unique musical alchemy, which turned saccharine material into art by imbuing it with the by turns cheeky and introspective flavors of Harlem stride. Getting paid $23 a week for it was Waller’s dream come true, but it gave his mother, who reviled jazz as “devil music,” a fatal heart attack. Constantly at odds with his increasingly religious father, Waller struck out on his own, dropping out of high school. Only sixteen years old and still in short pants, he studied with James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith, even as he mentored younger pianists.

Waller’s raucous way with popular tunes of the day, in which tears and laughter engaged in a never-ending slapstick tussle, made him a fixture on the rent party circuit, though other pianists tempered their admiration with envy—he was able to “cut” them in the song of their choice in all twelve keys. He also began leading his own ensembles and composing pop classics such as “Honeysuckle Rose,” “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter,” “Dinah,” and “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” as well as writing for nightclub revues. But Waller was notoriously unreliable. The “Hot Man of Harlem” started the day with two double shots, which he called “my liquid ham and eggs,” and he polished off a fifth of whiskey before gigs. His contracts stipulated a good piano and even better liquor. If by the end of the evening he was in no shape to go home, he would stay at Mother Shepherd’s speakeasy and boardinghouse, at 107 West 133rd Street, or he might sneak into the Abyssinian Baptist Church to play spirituals on the organ.

Although live music was the most common form of entertainment at rent parties, the piano ticklers were being replaced by a new kind of technology called the phonograph and another kind of music called blues. The earliest examples, crude yet wise, simple in form and yet infinitely open to variation, were written by a college-educated Alabaman named W. C. Handy who was based in Memphis. During his travels through the rural South as a minstrel show cornetist in the years after the turn of the century, Handy had been impressed by the way that amateur black musicians improvised “stop-time” breaks and flattened the third and seventh tones of the musical scale in order to produce “blue” notes. Neither technique was well known outside the deepest South, and Handy’s use of both in an electioneering ditty named “Memphis Blues” attracted the attention of a black insurance executive from Georgia named Harry Pace. Handy and Pace decided to start a music publishing company, and on a business trip to New York City in 1914 they convinced Sophie Tucker to add Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” to her routine. Music historians have identified it as the very first crossover success. But it wasn’t until 1920, with the release of a record called “Crazy Blues,” that a national craze for blues music helped the phonograph become the country’s primary musical medium. The tune was written by an Alabaman named Perry Bradford who hung out at the Colored Vaudeville Benevolent Association’s offices at 424 Lenox Avenue and who dreamed up the idea of recording black singers backed by black bands playing black material. Mamie Smith, a singer from Cincinnati who had been singing the tune under the name “Harlem Blues” for more than a year in Bradford’s show Maid in Harlem at the Lincoln Theatre, recorded a version that, despite the ridiculously expensive price of $1 and suspicions among the black middle classes about the morally problematic nature of the music—being a blues musician, the saying went, was like being black twice—became a massive hit. “Crazy Blues” sold more than seventy-five thousand copies in a few weeks in Harlem alone and 1.5 million nationwide within a few months, inaugurating a new era in American music and turning the phonograph record from a novelty into an industry.

The blues craze of the early 1920s was dominated by white-owned record labels, but there was plenty of room for Negroes with initiative, starting with none other than Harry Pace, who formed a recording label called Black Swan in the basement of his Striver’s Row home. He set the tone for the company, which was not at first a blues and jazz label but a “cultural” endeavor featuring largely classical recordings. With the backing of W.E.B. Du Bois and John Nail, Pace was able to hire the classical composer William Grant Still as house arranger. Lester Walton, who had been a member of the Frogs, the manager of the Lafayette Theatre, and the drama critic for the New York Age, became business manager. In its first year Black Swan sold $100,000 worth of records through the mail and in variety shops, dry goods merchants, and furniture stores, enough to move the company into proper quarters at 2289 Seventh Avenue.

Pace was an excellent talent scout. He regretted rejecting Bessie Smith as “too nitty gritty,” but he did sign Ethel Waters, whose earthy versions of “Down Home Blues” and “Oh, Daddy” sold five hundred thousand copies in six months, and he made stars out of Alberta Hunter, Lucille Hegamin, and Trixie Smith. The blues soon replaced rags, parlor songs, marches, and waltzes on American phonographs—“jazz” was at this point less a musical genre than a lifestyle—and Metronome magazine observed that “every phonograph company has a colored girl recording.” The light-skinned Pace, accused of passing for white for business reasons, had a complicated notion of racial uplift. Black Swan advertised itself as a “race music” label, with Pace trumpeting: “All other colored records are by artists only passing for colored,” and “Every Singer and Musician Used in All Our Records Is Colored.” The truth is that he more than once recorded white singers and marketed them as black. Nor was he above a lowest-common-denominator approach to material. In 1921 Mamie Smith recorded a naughty number called “Mama Whip! Mama Spank! (If Her Daddy Don’t Come Home).” Was Pace a race traitor or was he, like Philip Payton, a businessman whose notion of racial uplift happened to be profitable?

Black Swan was only one of many recording companies, black and white, to turn a generation of blues divas into national celebrities, but there was one singer who got away. The most beloved entertainer in Harlem during its glory years was not a down-and-dirty blues queen but a diminutive, spritely pop princess named Florence Mills. Born in 1895 in Washington, D.C., Mills performed in her hometown starting as a young child under the stage name Baby Florence. She didn’t make it uptown until 1921 when she joined a show called Shuffle Along, which was the first black show on segregated Broadway in more than a decade. The production was a big step forward for everyone involved, especially the composers Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, and the librettists Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, but it made the career of Mills, who stunned and delighted audiences with her renditions of “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “Love Will Find a Way.” Still, some New Negroes had their doubts about this turning point in the Harlem Renaissance. The New York Age’s Theophilus Lewis called the show “trash” because of its embrace of many of the cruder conventions of blackface minstrelsy.

Mills didn’t have the best voice or the best moves. Rather, the devotion she inspired was due to her loyalty to her core audience—she turned down a lucrative offer from Ziegfeld’s Follies in order to stay in the black theater. She was uptown’s everywoman, a down-to-earth star who greeted her neighbors on West 135th Street by name and rode the subway. After Shuffle Along she had her pick of work, starring in Harlem shows that made it to Broadway, such as Plantation Revue, Dover Street to Dixie, From Dixie to Broadway. She took the leading role in Blackbirds of 1926, which ran for six weeks at the newly opened, racially segregated Alhambra Theatre, at Seventh Avenue and West 126th Street—it had previously been the Keith Vaudeville House—before moving to London, where the prince of Wales was so impressed that he saw the show two dozen times. When Mills returned to the United States in September of 1927 thousands of fans showed up to greet her, but just a few weeks later she was rushed to the hospital, where she died at the age of thirty-two of the side effects of appendicitis, never having made a record or a film. Harlem gave Mills an extravagant sendoff, with nine thousand people coming to the viewing at Howell’s Mortuary and well over one hundred thousand watching the funeral procession. Another three thousand people crowded the service at Mother Zion AME Church before a plane released a flock of blackbirds above Seventh Avenue in memory of her song “I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird.” Not since the death of James Reese Europe had Harlem mourned one of its own so deeply, but tastes were changing, and they didn’t take long to find another favorite.

The only veteran of Shuffle Along to challenge Mills in talent, popularity, and critical acclaim was Paul Robeson, born in segregated Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898, the son of a North Carolina slave who escaped at the age of fifteen to serve in the Union army in the Civil War before becoming a preacher. Robeson distinguished himself both in the classroom and on the playing field, in addition to being a prizewinning public speaker who as a boy filled in for his father in church. Teammates at Rutgers University broke Robeson’s nose on the first day of football, while opposing squads—they often met at the Polo Grounds, one of uptown’s few unsegregated recreational facilities—targeted him for special brutality. Despite the demands of playing semiprofessional basketball at Harlem’s Manhattan Casino, singing solo recitals—“I only have an octave,” he joked, “but it’s the right octave”—and working as a porter at Grand Central Station, Robeson graduated as valedictorian in 1919. After watching the combustive passions of the Harlem Hellfighters parade being doused by news of Red Summer, he became determined to do something for the race. He starred in the groundbreaking production of the white dramatist Ridgely Torrence’s play Simon the Cyrenian at the Harlem YMCA, which had only recently relocated from midtown’s black bohemia to West 135th Street, before starting law school. He earned tuition money by coaching and playing football, singing, tutoring Latin, and working at the post office. He also spent some time at a white law firm but he quit because his secretary refused to work with a Negro. Robeson somehow found time to enjoy Harlem to the fullest, often in the company of the novelist and doctor Rudolph Fisher. Along with days in the law library and nights on the town, the tireless Robeson played in a number of groundbreaking shows, including Shuffle Along, before graduating from Columbia Law School in 1923. But he gave up a career as an attorney to star in the Provincetown Players’ versions of two Eugene O’Neill plays. The first was a revival of The Emperor Jones, the story of a Harlem pullman porter who escapes jail in the United States to set himself up as a Caribbean dictator. The role originally belonged to Charles Gilpin, a Virginian who came to New York before World War I and worked as an elevator operator rather than stoop to blackface minstrelsy. When he heard that O’Neill wanted to use a Negro instead of a white actor in blackface in The Emperor Jones, Gilpin brought his elevator to the first floor and walked away. His performance won him fame and honor, but he was unable to accept an award from the Drama League of New York because the event was whites-only, one of many humiliations that turned Gilpin to drink. Gilpin’s uncompromising racial attitudes also worked against him. He objected to O’Neill’s advice to his Negro actors to “Be yourselves!” and, when O’Neill decided against Gilpin for the new version of The Emperor Jones three years later, America’s most distinguished black actor went back to working as an elevator operator. Of course, it was not just Gilpin’s intransigence but Robeson’s onstage incandescence that convinced O’Neill to choose him for the new version of The Emperor Jones, as well as for his latest drama, a tragic race romance called All God’s Chillun Got Wings.

Robeson soon became one of the most popular figures uptown, with so many admirers that it took the “Black Colossus” an entire afternoon to walk down Seventh Avenue from West 143rd Street to West 133rd Street. After dark, Robeson partied with downtown whites such as Eugene O’Neill, Sherwood Anderson, Louise Brooks, and Alfred Knopf, as well as with Harlem royalty including James Weldon Johnson and Roland Hayes. He even escorted the Dahomeyan prince Kojo Touvalou Houenou on a tour of the Negro Mecca. One typical summer night in 1925 Robeson led his companions on a drinking binge that started at his home on West 127th Street and then moved to dinner at Craig’s restaurant, a show at the Lincoln Theatre, back to West 127th Street for more drinks, a show at the Lafayette, music and dancing at Smalls Paradise, a visit to the Vaudeville Club, and then back home again. But Robeson remained an artist above all. He studied spirituals with the singer Harry Burleigh, who had helped elevate “sorrow songs,” as Du Bois called them, from crude folk material only a notch above the blues to the level of art songs, and he began performing all-spirituals concerts. Although not particularly religious, Robeson had been raised in the church, so the raw emotionality of Robeson’s performances of “Go Down, Moses,” “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” and “Steal Away” wasn’t an act. Harlem had become even more segregated since World War I, especially when it came to nightlife. Even Robeson wasn’t allowed into many restaurants, clubs, and theaters. He was also increasingly unable to find good roles. He turned down the lead in at least one Broadway show that would have required him to black up. So Robeson got into the movies, accepting the unheard-of sum of $100,000 to appear in Body and Soul, by the black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, a South Dakota rancher turned novelist who had moved to Harlem and made a name for himself by making the very first all-black, full-length feature film.

While New Negroes were turning their blues into the blues, Harlem’s Latinos Nuevos were creating their own cultural renaissance. “South of the Border” flavors had permeated American popular music since the nineteenth century. W. C. Handy, who had performed with local musicians in Cuba as early as 1900, inserted a full-blown habanera into his landmark 1917 composition “St. Louis Blues,” James Reese Europe recorded a song called “Darky Tango,” and there wasn’t a major big band or uptown show that didn’t use Latino musicians. But what the pianist Jelly Roll Morton called “the Latin tinge” was little more than a fad, hence the tango and rumba lessons, contests, teas, picnics, and balls that took place at venues like the Palace Casino and the Manhattan Casino. That didn’t start to change until 1917, when the Puerto Rican singer María Teresa Vera played the old Apollo Theater. The Club Cívico Puertorriqueno had a dance hall and a house band to play in it on East 125th Street as early as 1923, but more often social clubs simply rented facilities like the vast Park Palace and the more intimate Park Plaza, two clubs in the same building at the corner of West 110th Street and Fifth Avenue. But Harlemites couldn’t hear authentic Latin music regularly until 1926, when the old Apollo, which could no longer attract Jewish audiences to see vaudeville, began featuring music from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba on Sunday nights. Soon East Harlemites could frequent the Golden Casino, the Toreador, the Kubanacan, the Teatro Triboro, the Star Casino, the San José, and the Mount Morris Theatre, at Fifth Avenue and West 116th Street, also known as the Campoamor, after the Havana theater of the same name. These venues offered not just concerts and dances but a rich variety of Spanish-language film, serious drama, vaudeville, and benefits. Puerto Ricans dominated these events, although Cubans, Mexicans, and Dominicans were also part of the mix. As in Negro Harlem, there were usually a handful of slummers as well. Ethnic and national tensions erupted from time to time, especially when Cuban bands faced off against those from Puerto Rico. But as far as the music was concerned, the racial caste system that operated west of Fifth Avenue and downtown, where many functions involving Latin music were “para raza blanca,” was unheard of in East Harlem, which soon boasted its own constellation of star performers. At the same time, black jazz musicians continued to raid the Latin music repertoire, performing tunes like Moises Simons’s “El Manicero” or “The Peanut Vendor” after the song became a hit for a Cuban named Don Azpiazu and his Havana Casino Orchestra.

The first bona fide uptown Latin music icon was Manuel “Canario” Jiménez, who came to East Harlem in 1914 and joined the Merchant Marines, where he got his nickname for singing as beautifully as a canary. Canario was to the East Harlem plena as W. C. Handy was to the blues: not the inventor but the popularizer. Like the blues, the plena was a tightly structured, African-derived musical form that could be endlessly adapted, resulting in romantic songs such as “Cuando Las Mujeres Quieren a los Hombres” (“When Women Love Men”) and the current-events tune “La Prohibición Nos Tiene” (“Prohibition’s Got Us”). It was particularly well suited to the subject of immigrant dislocation, and plenas like “Los Misterios de Lenox” (“The Mysteries of Lenox Avenue”) and “En la Ciento Diez y Seis” (“On 116th Street”) confronted the joys and sorrows of Puerto Ricans uptown.

The blues would never have become popular had it not been for the sound businessmen like instincts of W. C. Handy and Harry Pace, and the same was true for Latin music. A white Puerto Rican dentist named Julio Roqué, who excelled as a pianist and violinist in addition to conducting, composing, and arranging, used his office as a booking agency for his own groups, and others as well, and he often worked on the teeth of musicians for free. Roqué even started the “Revista Roqué,” the first Spanish-language radio program in New York, which featured Roqué’s own recordings on the Victor label, as well as guests from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and of course El Barrio in between advertisements for Roqué’s own brand of toothpaste and mouthwash.

Commerce and art also went hand in hand in the combined music and grocery store on Madison Avenue near East 115th Street run by two black Puerto Rican siblings named Victoria and Rafael Hernández. A veteran of James Reese Europe’s Harlem Hellfighters, Rafael took care of the music while Victoria took care of the money—she was known by her friends as La Madrina (“The Godmother”) and by her enemies as La Judía (“The Jewess”), the latter a term of derision, not necessarily an indication that she was Jewish. Either way, she made her brother a star by convincing him to give up the faux-Latin stage costumes for proper American suits. As in the Negro Mecca, the search for an authentic identity required a fearless experimentation in combination with centuries-old traditions. But Harlemites, whatever their skin color or language, didn’t live by culture alone.

The quest for dignity being pursued by Negro and Latino entertainers in the 1920s seemed quixotic at a time when living conditions in Harlem were already bad and deteriorating rapidly. An exploding population and no new housing construction meant ever stronger demand, which gave landlords small incentive to maintain buildings properly. This created conditions that ranged from deplorable to dangerous. One city commission found that most uptown housing was unfit even for animals. This wasn’t only a problem in Negro and Latino Harlem, but in the remaining Italian and Jewish neighborhoods as well. Tuberculosis rates in black neighborhoods, already twice that of white areas at the end of World War I, doubled during the 1920s, while epidemics of poliomyelitis and influenza proved too much for Italian casket makers to handle. The five-piece band and painted backdrop of a pastoral scene that immigrants favored at funerals ceased to become the rule, since most funeral homes had only one of each.

The irrelevance of mainstream politics in the face of these kinds of realities was one reason that Marcus Garvey attracted so many followers. It wasn’t only “chronic Republicanism” but gerrymandering that kept blacks from dominating any single district. That didn’t mean politicians were totally ineffective. Uptown’s most beloved public servant was neither black nor a Harlemite. The Republican Jimmy Walker, known as the jazz mayor because he frequented speakeasies with a Ziegfeld girl on his arm, won uptown easily in both 1925 and 1929 and returned the favor by acting decisively on racial issues such as the desegregation of Harlem Hospital. Another favorite was Abraham Grenthal, a Jewish Republican state legislator who out-Tammanied Tammany Hall, working for more playgrounds and bathhouses, better housing conditions, and restrictions on rent increases. Despite his popularity, Grenthal was opposed by the New York Age’s Fred Moore, who helped Grenthal’s black rival for the assembly seat, Charles W. Fillmore—a New York State tax auditor and yet another veteran of the Harlem Hellfighters—unseat Grenthal in an election that saw Moore become one of Harlem’s aldermen.

The rise of the movement known as “Black Tammany” promised change, especially in the form of the United Colored Democracy, the Negro wing of the Democratic Party, which flourished under the leadership of Ferdinand Q. Morton. After becoming Civil Service Commission chairman in 1922—payback for years of delivering votes—Morton exercised real power, helping put an end to years of blacks being frozen out of jobs as firemen or policemen or as anything beyond menial laborers at public agencies. Harlemites paid a price for the success of Morton, who ran Democratic Harlem like a fiefdom, controlling patronage and determining who ran for office. He demanded that suitors for a place on the Democratic ticket kick back 10 percent of their earnings. As if that weren’t enough power, he also bought the New York Age.

Latino politics was slower to develop across town, where political clubs based on national origin impeded East Harlemites from speaking with a single voice. It wasn’t until late July 1926, when Harlem’s Jews, Irish, and blacks joined forces against the “invasion” of what the New York Times called a “Porto Rican army,” that uptown’s Latinos came together for the first time as a community. Led by the Porto Rican Brotherhood of New York, they complained to the police commissioner about frequent assaults by blacks and called a protest meeting early the next month at the Harlem Casino to discuss the situation. The idea was not simply to respond to the recent crisis but to work on more fundamental problems, including the lack of a Puerto Rican community center uptown. This self-defining moment promised to become the Latino equivalent of the Silent Protest Parade. But the overtures these groups made to black, Jewish, and Italian Harlemites were mostly futile, and they realized that change would come only from within. Whereas outsiders had been lumping together all Spanish-speakers as “Spanish” (hence the misleading and, to some, insulting term “Spanish Harlem”) East Harlem now became known as El Barrio, or “the Neighborhood.” The political unity of Latinos was easily accomplished, at least in comparison to the situation in Negro Harlem, as the coming together of Spanish-speakers uptown was made all the easier because most Latinos reflexively supported Democrats and rejected socialism and nationalism. It wasn’t a matter of ideological affinity. This was after all the same party that split up Harlem into four assembly districts with the goal of dividing Jewish, black, Italian, and Latino votes. Rather they supported Tammany Hall because, despite the growing Republican presence, that’s where the political power in New York City was. Tammany Hall could count on votes in El Barrio without offering much in return.

Another result of the events of 1926 was the founding of El Barrio’s first newspaper by a group of writers, theater workers, and tabaqueros. The slogan of El Gráfico, which was Semanario Defensor de la Raza Hispana, or “Defender of the Hispanic Race,” neatly captured how ideologically portable the Garveyesque investment in race could be in the 1920s. The leading figure behind El Gráfico, the actor and writer Alberto O’Farrill, couldn’t avoid being inspired by the UNIA, up to a point. Born in 1899 in Cuba, he arrived in East Harlem in the early 1920s. He spent much of the decade onstage, where he specialized in “negrito” (Spanish-language blackface), comic musical sketches, and operetta. When it came to journalism, O’Farrill could be deadly serious, and El Gráfico offered an uncompromising pan-Hispanic vision that included not just news and editorials critical of United States policy in Puerto Rico but fiction, advice columns, movie reviews, and cartoons. There was also a first-person column called “Ofa,” about a black Puerto Rican immigrant adjusting to life in the Big Apple. But the kind of racial diversity that dominated El Barrio seemed incompatible with the increasingly strict racial polarization favored by both blacks and whites across town in the Negro Mecca.

While the mainstream politicians conducted business as usual, Garvey was busy getting things done, or so it seemed. “Up, you mighty race,” the UNIA’s slogan said. “You can accomplish what you will.” Garvey willed much, but his accomplishments are still subject to dispute. After the end of World War I the UNIA grew quickly, as much because of Garvey’s magnetic personality as increasing black poverty and a rising tide of racism. Still, his pronouncements on the organization’s size were notoriously unreliable. He eventually claimed two million followers in thirty branch offices across the Americas, when in fact the UNIA’s membership never topped twenty thousand. They paid dues of 35 cents a month in return for illness and death benefits, but few ever saw anything concrete in return. That didn’t seem to matter, as long as Garvey articulated clear and direct solutions to the problems that plagued black Harlemites. This wasn’t only a matter of loyalty. Some Garveyites had fled socialism in the wake of Red Summer and were simply looking for an ideological home. Others with less radical leanings felt unrepresented by the philanthropists and academics in charge of the Urban League and the NAACP. Garvey had even attracted some conservative black Republicans who worshipped Booker T. Washington, read the New York Age, and responded to the common sense of Garvey’s question “How can a Negro be conservative? What has he to conserve?”

Garvey started UNIA restaurants, grocery stores, laundries, a publishing house, a textile factory, a hat shop, a hotel, and a tailor. Garvey’s UNIA shipping line and cruise company, the Black Star Line—contrary to popular opinion, it never focused on sending African-Americans back to Africa—was financed by selling shares at $5 each, but only to Negroes. In the depths of Red Summer the idea seemed foolish. But he was soon showing off the S.S. Yarmouth, a decades-old cotton and coal barge on the Hudson River at West 135th Street. In fact, the ship didn’t even belong to the Black Star Line yet, which, as the New York State district attorney’s office notified Garvey, constituted legal fraud. Garvey wrote off the warning as nothing more than the work of jealous enemies.

Garvey was a genius at raising money but a disaster at running things. He promised poor Harlemites that “the Black Star Line will turn over large profits and dividends to stockholders and operate to their interest even whilst they sleep.” But Garvey failed to make the first payment of $6,500 on the newly rechristened S.S. Frederick Douglass. The maiden voyage was delayed until October 1919 when, cheered on by the UNIA band and thousands of spectators, many of whom had paid a dollar to tour the ship, the vessel made its way down the Hudson River from West 135th Street to West 23rd Street, captained by whites hired by the white owners—without insurance they couldn’t put Garvey’s people at the wheel. Garvey eventually solved that problem and the next month the vessel sailed to the West Indies and Central America, returning in January bearing two hundred passengers and eight hundred thousand pounds of firewood. A month later a second voyage started from Harlem bound for the West Indies, where it picked up coconuts and delivered them to New York. Garvey was suddenly the owner of what looked to become a successful business. He recapitalized the venture, bought two more boats, and began dreaming about a Black Star navy.

Garvey’s broader goals were also coming into focus. He held the UNIA’s first annual convention, the International Convention of Negro Peoples of the World. More than twenty-five thousand delegates from dozens of countries paraded from Harlem to the old Madison Square Garden, shouting along with Garvey as he exhorted: “One God! One Aim! One Destiny!” Although Garvey was a strict anticolonialist, he loved the trappings of Old World grandeur. He wore a gold, green, and purple gown and a feathered helmet and assumed the position of provisional president of the African Republic, despite never having even visited the continent. Garvey gave the UNIA’s leadership outrageous and fanciful titles: Negro World contributing editor John E. Bruce was named Knight of the Nile, while others received titles such as Overlord of Uganda and Duke of the Niger. During the monthlong convention, Garvey unveiled the tricolor UNIA flag: red for blood, black for race, and green for Africa. Marcus Garvey cigars, lapel buttons, and medals, as well as stock in UNIA businesses, were all for sale.

Marcus Garvey’s movement was driven by imagery—skin color, flags, uniforms, and pictures taken by the UNIA’s official photographer, a Massachusetts native named James Van Der Zee who came to Harlem at the age of twenty-two in 1908. He settled at Lenox Avenue and West 138th Street and worked as an elevator operator, waiter, and violinist before opening Guarantee Photo in 1916 at 109 West 135th Street. With the help of his second wife, a white woman who passed as black, he specialized in commercial portrait photography, capturing school and church groups, social clubs, athletic teams, weddings, funerals, and families. “The Rembrandt of Harlem” also snapped Mamie Smith, Bojangles Robinson, Florence Mills, and Jack Johnson, the world heavyweight champion prizefighter who was now making a career for himself as a musician, actor, nightclub impresario, stockbroker, and lecturer. Van Der Zee’s images often ended up on posters and calendars, as well as in Garvey’s Negro World, but he considered himself an artist, and one who rebelled against the realist strain that then prevailed in photography. In contrast, Van Der Zee’s work was dramatically stylized, with far-fetched poses and extensive backdrops, costumes, and makeup. In the darkroom Van Der Zee went even further, using retouching to lighten skin color or straighten hair; he called it “beautifying.”

Uplifting the race clearly meant different things to different Harlemites. Even as the fame of the provisional president of Africa grew, opposition was building. At first, the radicals mostly left Garvey alone, nor did he draw much comment from the mainstream figures W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Anderson, and Adam Clayton Powell, who even let his son march with the UNIA. Eventually, however, Harlem’s Talented Tenth began to change their minds, starting with Garvey’s fellow Jamaican Claude McKay, who made it respectable to remain distant from the UNIA when, in 1919, he declined to read “If We Must Die” at Liberty Hall.

Part of the opposition was due to the questionable nature of Garvey’s business operations. He overpaid for ships and then mismanaged them, though he never enriched himself at the expense of stockholders or customers. Then again, the Black Star Line did buy his home at 235 West 131st Street, and it also paid the bills of UNIA businesses. The UNIA even bought Black Star Line shares. Such transactions were irregular, and in some cases illegal, but then again no Garvey enterprise kept proper records. The S.S. Frederick Douglass sailed to the Caribbean three times, the last time piloted by a white man, but it never exceeded seven knots and it couldn’t fight even the mild currents of the Straits of Florida. One of Garvey’s boats making day trips up the Hudson River, again piloted by a white captain, never made money, and it sank in late 1920. There was a deadly explosion on board another Black Star Line vessel. Nor were Garvey efforts at “Liberian Construction” successful. He raised more than $137,000 and in 1921 sent representatives to the country in West Africa in order to found a new African capital, but the delegation ran out of money. Harlemites were willing to give money to Garvey, but uprooting themselves once again in search of a better life in Africa, of all places—the actor Charles Gilpin wondered publically how he could go back to a country he’d never been to—was beyond most of them, especially after they learned that Liberia’s politicians had confiscated construction materials and deported the delegation.

Garvey’s commitment to race pride was impressive but skin deep. Negro World promoted the very first colored dolls, manufactured in Harlem in “mulatto,” “light brown,” and “high brown.” As time went on, it became clear that Garvey’s obsession with race and racial purity would never be politically viable. He started denying UNIA membership to blacks who married whites. He called Du Bois a cross-bred tool of white puppeteers. He swore that the light-skinned Cyril Briggs of the African Blood Brotherhood was only passing for black. Hubert Harrison drove the circulation of Negro World to more than two hundred thousand but he quit because of Garvey’s mania for racial purity. A. Philip Randolph formed an anti-Garvey group called Friends of Negro Freedom, which held meetings attacking Garvey’s brand of black capitalism on Sunday nights at the Lafayette Theatre, where the cruel joke that UNIA stood for “Ugliest Negroes in America” got plenty of laughs. Garvey countered his critics by appealing to a higher authority. He founded an African Orthodox Church, led by George Alexander McGuire, an Episcopalian priest from Boston who preached that God, Mary, and Jesus were all black, and that the devil was white. McGuire argued, “When Europe was inhabited by a race of cannibals, a race of savages, naked men, heathens and pagans, Africa was peopled with a race of cultured black men, who were masters in art, science, and literature.”

In addition to founding a UNIA church, Garvey maintained close links to Harlem’s tiny group of black Hebrews, who traced their lineage to the ancient Jewish community in Ethiopia. In Harlem they followed a professional wrestler turned rabbi—his formal religious credentials were questionable—from Lagos, Nigeria, named Wentworth Arthur Matthew. Along with Arnold Josiah Ford, a Barbados-born musician and “rabbi” who composed the UNIA anthem and served as Garvey’s musical director, Matthew founded Beth B’nai Abraham Synagogue at 29 West 131st Street. The congregation followed many traditional practices but remained unacceptable to mainstream Jewish organizations because of its embrace of everything from Ethiopian Orthodox Christian traditions to Garveyite racial pseudoscience to mental telepathy. A split between Ford and Matthew resulted in the founding of Congregation Beth Ha-Tefilah, also known as the Commandment Keepers of the Living God, which bought the 1890 mansion of John Dwight, the heir to the Arm and Hammer baking soda fortune, at 1 West 123rd Street. Within a few years the movement had grown to include nearly two thousand followers, most of them West Indian Garveyites, in three black synagogues in Harlem, according to the New York Sun. One of them, the Royal Order of Ethiopian Hebrews, founded by elder Warren Robinson at West 128th Street and Lenox Avenue, featured gospel-style music and lots of Yiddish before it closed amid charges of child abuse and financial misconduct.

Garvey knew the risks of associating with such characters, but he knew the benefits, too, and the UNIA became a platform for all manner of extremism and eccentricity. One of the UNIA’s most outrageous figures was the Trinidadian “Gentleman Flyer,” Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, who often put an “M.D.” after his name—it stood for “mechanical designer.” In mid-April of 1923 Harlemites began to notice posters announcing: “WATCH THE CLOUDS—JULIAN IS ARRIVING FROM THE SKY.” Sure enough, within a week he had donned a scarlet bodysuit and jumped out of a plane trailing a flag that read “Hoenig’s Optical Is Open Today.” He drifted down onto the roof of a nearby post office, disappointing the Harlem funeral home that had paid for the right to exhibit his corpse. Eventually, the man dubbed the Black Eagle by the New York Telegram began thinking bigger. In 1924 he donned a sky-blue flight suit, climbed into the cockpit of a plane called the Abyssinia, and took off from the Hudson River at West 139th Street bound for Ethiopia. It would have been the first solo transatlantic flight had Julian not crashed in Flushing Bay minutes after takeoff.

UNIA clowns like Hubert Julian got lots of laughs, but many Harlemites had serious concerns about Garvey, not so much because of his racial agenda as his opposition to the international labor socialism that still dominated the left in Harlem. When Garvey wasn’t mocking the light skin color of the leaders and adherents of the NAACP or the African Blood Brotherhood, he was doing J. Edgar Hoover’s work and calling them communists—even as he proposed nationalizing industries. The federal government, which had black operatives inside the UNIA, finally arrested Garvey in January 1922 on mail fraud charges. Then it came out that Garvey, who had long bragged of his status as “a full-blooded black man” of “pure African” stock, and who banned anyone of mixed race from holding office, had traveled to Atlanta and met secretly with the KKK in order to gain the Klan’s support for a Back to Africa movement. Harlem’s establishment exploded in anger. Du Bois wrote in the Crisis that Garvey was “the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and the world” and that he was “either a lunatic or a traitor.” A. Philip Randolph, who held mass meetings demanding that the United States deport Garvey, wasn’t wholly surprised when he opened a package in the mail and found a human hand with a note ordering the Messenger to back off on its criticism of Garvey. Such tactics led a group of race leaders, including Robert Bagnall of the NAACP, John E. Nail, Chandler Owen, and Harry Pace, to ask the United States attorney general’s office, which had long labored to silence the Messenger, to “completely disband and extirpate this vicious movement.” Garvey struck back with his favorite weapon, calling the group, which purposely did not include Du Bois or Randolph, “nearly all Octoroons and Quadroons.” Eventually Garvey was indicted and brought to trial, where he fired his lawyer and took charge of his own defense. The proceedings at times resembled a legal circus, until Garvey was convicted, fined $1,000, and sentenced to five years in prison. There was time for one last speech to followers. “My work is just begun,” Garvey told the crowd at Liberty Hall. Out on bail pending an appeal, he tried to stave off disaster by hiring as Negro World’s new assistant managing editor the legendary T. Thomas Fortune, by then a much diminished figure, weakened by decades of alcoholism and constant changes in political allegiance. Garvey started a new shipping line but the government blocked the deal. He even made overtures toward Tammany Hall, but seeing Garvey genuflecting before white Democrats was too much for many UNIA supporters, who abandoned the movement in droves, especially after Garvey was convicted on new tax evasion and perjury charges. Nonetheless, a popular song from 1924 has a West Indian New Yorker fantasizing about returning to the islands and planning a Garvey-inspired comeback.

Done give up de bestest job

A’runnin’ elevator

I told my boss “Mon” I’d be back

Sometime sooner or later.

When I git back to this great land

You better watch me Harvey

’Cause I’m gonna be a great big “Mon”

Like my frien’ Marcus Garvey.

With core support like that, Garvey was undeterred, insisting that his work, like that of Jesus Christ himself, wasn’t yet finished. “Look for me in the whirlwind,” he wrote. Had the barely literate Garvey read his Bible more closely, he might have refrained from quoting such a self-incriminating passage from the prophet Hosea, the full version of which warns: “They sow the wind and shall reap the whirlwind.”

With Garvey out of the way, the political interests that had joined to attack him broke apart. W. A. Domingo, appalled by the anti–West Indian rhetoric of the Messenger during the first Garvey trial, kept his distance from A. Philip Randolph, as did James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP, which was as always leery of anything that smacked of radical labor. Even Chandler Owen, who became a bitter opponent of the socialists after his brother was denied admission to one of New York’s all-white socialist unions, gave up on Randolph. But new coalitions were in the making. Randolph, an ideologically agile survivor, started inviting a variety of race radicals and left-wingers to his house on West 142nd Street for Sunday morning brunch and conversation. Among the new faces was a young socialist from Rhode Island, George Schuyler, who was soon doing everything at the Messenger from editing copy to mopping the floor of the newspaper’s two messy rooms at 2305 Seventh Avenue.

Randolph needed all the help he could get when he was asked in 1925 to help organize workers at the Pullman Company, the country’s biggest private employer of blacks. Jobs as Pullman porters were at the time very desirable, ranking just below doctors, engineers, and lawyers in the black economy. It was steady work, and even though employees had to provide their own uniforms, tools, supplies, and food, porters were relatively well compensated, earning about $70 a month. Randolph worried about fixing something that wasn’t broken, but after five hundred porters turned up to an organizing meeting at the Elks Imperial Lodge #127 on West 129th Street, he knew that the numbers were on the side of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Ironically, it wasn’t the antiunion intransigence of the Pullman Company—which had broken many unionization efforts, harassed and fired brotherhood members, and portrayed Randolph as a traitorous bolshevik while presenting itself as a blessing to the race—that made the struggle so difficult but the intense racism of the labor movement as a whole. Most unions still refused membership to blacks. Labor organizations that did accept them, including the American Federation of Labor, did so only in principle, not in practice. Nor could Randolph always count on local support. The Abyssinian Baptist Church, Salem Methodist Church, and St. James Presbyterian all stood behind him, but uptown preachers regularly gave over their pulpits to antiunion speakers, and the New York Age refused to help an enterprise so opposed to the antimilitant ideals of Booker T. Washington. As the struggle dragged on, the brotherhood saw its membership rolls dwindle, and because it refused donations from whites money was always short. Randolph himself, who rarely saw a paycheck, was living in poverty because the wives of his many enemies shunned his wife’s hair salon. In the midst of a much-celebrated Negro Renaissance, the most optimistic man in Harlem was losing hope.

The politics of the New Negro movement was long in the making, yet its literature seemed to come out of nowhere. There were no publishing houses or journals devoted to Negro literature before World War I, and none of the very few novels published in the United States after the turn of the century by blacks such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, or James Weldon Johnson were set in Harlem—they didn’t even mention uptown’s growing black community. Nor was drama central to the articulation of the new racial sensibility, since even productions at black theaters often smacked of Old Negro traditions. Downtown dramas by white writers provided most of the legitimate acting opportunities for blacks throughout the period. It was only in 1923 that Willis Richardson’s The Chip Woman’s Fortune became the first legitimate drama by a Negro to make it to Broadway. Starting the next year, W.E.B. Du Bois founded the Krigwa Players (an acronym for Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists), but the group focused on black versions of the traditional classics. It wasn’t until 1929 that the National Colored Players, the first theater troupe allied with the new racial aesthetics, began working out of the West End Theatre.

While African-American novelists and dramatists struggled to imagine an art worthy of the Negro Mecca, poetry got the job done. Once again, a Jamaican led the way, rejecting both the now embarrassing dialect verse and the stilted imitations of formal English verse that still dominated black poetry. After Claude McKay broke through to wider recognition with his 1919 poem “If We Must Die,” he became a communist and spent most of his time with the Greenwich Village bohemian crowd. He hadn’t given up on race, and though he didn’t have much use for the skin games so often played by what he derisively termed “that NAACP crowd,” his poetry combined traditional formal rigor with political militancy, harnessing delicate rhythms to daring and defiant racial ideas. His collection Harlem Shadows, often considered the first book of the Harlem Renaissance, was published in 1922 to wildly enthusiastic reviews in both black and white newspapers. McKay still wasn’t satisfied. His notions about the artistic and political significance of skin color helped define the New Negro movement, but he despised being known as a black writer. Longing to escape from what he called the “suffocating ghetto of color consciousness,” McKay became the first New Negro to reject the movement, shocking his friends, uptown and downtown, by taking off for Russia. He never again lived in Harlem, though in his imagination he never lived anywhere else.

McKay’s departure came just as the mainstream black institutions were getting into the arts, what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the kingdom of culture.” If Du Bois was for a time the reigning monarch of that nation, his queen was the literary editor of the Crisis. Jessie Fauset was born in the early 1880s and raised in Philadelphia in a well-educated, ambitious, and politically aware family that sent her to Cornell, where she majored in Latin and Greek and became the first black woman to make Phi Beta Kappa there or anywhere. She supported herself as a teacher in Washington, D.C., until 1918 when, at an age when the few black women in America who had careers could consider changing them, she accepted Du Bois’s job offer and moved in with her sister at Seventh Avenue and West 117th Street. Fauset became one of the first New Negresses, an audaciously modern woman who smoked, danced, wore short skirts, and hosted a tony Sunday afternoon salon where guests were expected to speak French.

As literary editor of Du Bois’s Crisis, Fauset was always on the lookout for home-grown talent. Her signal discovery was Langston Hughes, who always said he was in love with Harlem long before he ever got there. Born in 1902 in Missouri and raised in Kansas, Ohio, and Mexico, Hughes learned to read from the Old Testament and the New Testament, and from the New Negro Testament: Du Bois’s Crisis. Hughes was nineteen years old and still in high school when he sent Fauset a poem called “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Her response to this confident manifesto of solidarity with the black race and the human race as a whole encouraged Hughes to come to New York, having promised his father that he would study something practical at Columbia. He never kept his promise, having found more inspiration in the morning rush hour scene on West 135th Street, with its rainbow of skin colors and ideologies, than in his textbooks. After being assigned a broom closet near the dormitory exit, far away from his white peers, he moved into the Harlem YMCA, which was becoming the first destination for many newcomers, and started drinking in the atmosphere. He listened to the street corner speakers and went almost daily to the theater. He haunted the 135th Street public library, which a white librarian named Ernestine Rose was turning into the unofficial staging area of the Harlem Renaissance—she hired black assistants, sponsored concerts and art shows, and opened the building up to meetings of the NAACP, the Liberty League, the Anti-lynching Crusade, the Mozart Choral Society, the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, and the Book Lovers Club. Hughes stayed up for nights on end making the nightclub scene. When Bert Williams died, Hughes attended the funeral rather than take an exam. In the spring of 1922 he came out from under the protective wings of Jessie Fauset and W.E.B. Du Bois and joined a Merchant Marine vessel bound for Africa, becoming the first New Negro to visit the continent. He left convinced that however lost, obscured, or incomprehensible Africa might be to Negroes in America, it could still provide an endlessly relevant source of artistic inspiration. It was the blues, though, which Hughes had been hearing in uptown cabarets, that instigated the breakthrough poetry published in his first book, The Weary Blues, in 1926. Not everyone loved the book, whose very title advertised allegiance with a musical genre that was still a source of shame and scandal.

Soon after discovering the Harlem Renaissance’s poet laureate Jessie Fauset found a novelist to match. Jean Toomer was born in 1894 into Washington, D.C.’s byzantine mulatto aristocracy, where he was sometimes white and sometimes black, depending on the family finances. After attending M Street High School, where Fauset was a teacher, Toomer came to Harlem around 1917. He took classes at City College before drifting around the South, where he first heard the blues. He returned to Harlem and with Fauset’s encouragement published Cane, a masterpiece regardless of time, place, or race, in part because the book was, like Toomer himself, uncategorizable. Its mingling of high modernist form and rural African-American folk content stunned the critics, but before the year was out he was denying his race, exploding angrily after his publisher called him “a promising Negro writer,” and planning his escape.

Jesse Fauset kept scouring the regional black press for new voices, but she found the poet Countee Cullen right in her own backyard. Cullen’s origins are, like that of so many Harlemites, a mystery, but it is clear that he was living uptown by 1917, when he was taken in by the Reverend Frederick Ashbury Cullen of Harlem’s Salem Methodist Episcopal Church and given a home at 234 West 131st Street. By the time he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and was headed to New York University he knew he was a writer. But he hesitated before the blackness that so many Harlem writers were embracing. “Yet I do marvel at this curious thing,” Cullen wrote in one of his best-known poems. “To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” While still in college Cullen had won a slew of national poetry contests, among them those sponsored by the NAACP and the Urban League, and he had published in the premier Negro journals of the day, including Fauset’s Crisis. He was living in Salem Methodist’s church parsonage, a grand, fourteen-room row house at 2190 Seventh Avenue, and keeping his homosexuality only partly in the closet, when he published his first book, Color. The title was perhaps misleading, since he insisted that he was “a POET and not a NEGRO Poet.” Cullen refused money from the white philanthropists who seemed determined to finance a certain kind of blackness.

Even as she groomed the careers of others Fauset had plans for a book of her own. That was not an unusual situation in the NAACP, whose top brass, starting with Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, published novels. Even more successful was Walter White, an Atlantan whose light skin color—he called himself a “voluntary Negro”—proved useful in investigating southern lynchings on behalf of the NAACP, and whose home at 90 Edgecombe Avenue in Sugar Hill attracted some of the most important figures, white and black, in music, literature, philosophy, and politics. White’s 1924 book The Fire in the Flint almost became the first Harlem Renaissance novel—by that time, Jean Toomer was denying that Cane was even a black novel—but Fauset beat him to it with There Is Confusion, a roman à clef about a poor but hardworking striver and the terminally classy daughter of a prominent Harlem family. Whatever the artistic faults of There Is Confusion—Fauset counted herself among those race-preoccupied Negroes who were “so persistently persecuted and harassed that we can think, breathe, do nothing but consider our great obsession”—it was the start of something big.

It was a bespectacled sociologist named Charles S. Johnson who realized that There Is Confusion was more than a mere book, and the banquet he held to celebrate its publication is yet another of the moments that is said to have kicked off the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson, whose attitudes about resisting racism were inspired by having watched his father, a Baptist preacher, face down a Virginia lynch mob, was among the masses of Negroes who signed up for service in World War I, working his way up from private to sergeant major with the 103rd Pioneer Infantry unit in France. He returned from Europe a week after the Chicago riot that left thirty-eight people dead and joined the National Urban League before moving to New York City in 1923 to become the organization’s director of research. The next year he founded Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, but it was only after Johnson began attending the nonstop salon his secretary Ethel Ray Nance hosted at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue that he became aware of a burgeoning literary scene that promised more change than a library full of sociological studies.

Johnson’s belief in the uplifting powers of culture was according to many accounts the Copernican shift that made the Harlem Renaissance viable, and the March 21, 1924, party that Opportunity sponsored to celebrate Fauset’s novel—ironically, the gathering took place not in Harlem but at downtown’s Civic Club because no other banquet hall in the city was open to both women and blacks—was not merely a book party but a celebration of the “Debut of the Younger School of Negro Writers.” What had been planned as a quiet dinner turned into a major cultural event, attended not only by mandarins of New Negro culture such as Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois, but by white tastemakers the likes of H. L. Mencken, Carl Van Doren, and Eugene O’Neill. What they ate and wore was soon forgotten, but hearing Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” read by James Weldon Johnson had an indelible impact. Within a week the publisher Alfred Knopf was begging Hughes for a book.

The success of the Civic Club affair was due largely to Alain Locke, who was born in 1885 into the same kind of old black Philadelphia family that had produced Jessie Fauset. After graduating from Harvard, Locke became the first black Rhodes scholar and joined the faculty of Howard University, where he taught his students that the African arts might serve as a source of cultural renewal for Negroes and for all Americans, even if for most blacks Africa was, in Countee Cullen’s ironic words, “a book one thumbs.” Still, it wasn’t a terribly risky gesture for Locke, who owed much to Arthur Schomburg’s claim that “the American Negro must remake his past in order to remake his future.” Nor could Locke fail to acknowledge Europeans such as Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso, and André Breton, who had looked to “the dark continent” as a beacon of modernism. He was surely aware that the black writer William Stanley Brathwaite had written as early as 1901: “We are at the commencement of a ‘negroid’ renaissance.” So this diminutive, gay, snobbish, squeaky-voiced philosopher who never lived uptown—but who knew Harlem from the Black Bottom to Sugar Hill—seemed an unlikely godfather for the Harlem Renaissance, especially since he was responsible for as much conflict as cooperation. The Messenger and Claude McKay despised the Du Boisian elitism that Locke personified, and Jean Toomer declined to attend the Civic Club dinner on the grounds that he was no longer a Negro. At the same time, the increasingly political dimension of Langston Hughes’s poetry was alienating Jessie Fauset and Countee Cullen.

These rumblings of discontent couldn’t stop the momentum of the Civic Club dinner, which so impressed the white editor of the Survey Graphic, an illustrated magazine that appealed to a broad white readership, that he hired Locke to edit the March 1925 issue, which was to be devoted to the New Negro movement. Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, included works by the usual suspects, with articles by James Weldon Johnson, Arthur Schomburg, Walter White, and Locke himself, whose “Enter the New Negro” became the unofficial manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance. There was also poetry by the familiar figures Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. Harlemites were more excited by the newcomers. The most prominent was a Kansan named Aaron Douglas who arrived in Harlem in 1924 at the age of twenty-six and embarked on a modernist reimagining of African visual aesthetics. Another new talent was Rudolph Fisher, a doctor from Washington, D.C., who moved to Harlem in 1925 at the age of twenty-eight and divided his time between taking medical and artistic X-rays of his neighbors. The commercial success of Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro— it sold forty-four thousand copies in a matter of weeks—inspired Locke to reach for an even wider audience. Six months later he convinced the publishers Albert and Charles Boni to expand the collection into a book called The New Negro.

Charles Johnson upped the stakes by holding a literary competition. The first Opportunity honors, awarded by a biracial panel of literary bigwigs, were handed out in May 1925 at a downtown dinner. Within days of the awards ceremony, which was clearly meant to recall the Civic Club dinner of a year earlier, a Negro Renaissance was being heralded on the front pages of the newspapers, uptown and downtown. W.E.B. Du Bois was so impressed that he arranged for a similar contest to be sponsored by the Crisis, with the winners announced at a banquet at the Renaissance Casino. The Opportunity and Crisis awards honored Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen as well as a number of new discoveries such as Dorothy West and her cousin, Helene Johnson. The real find that year was a new arrival named Zora Neale Hurston. As with so many New Negroes, the facts surrounding her early years were lost to government institutions that didn’t offer the dignity of a birth certificate to Negroes, but also to what Hurston herself would later call the Negro “will to adorn.” She seems to have been born around 1901 in Eatonville, Florida, a voluntarily black town where everyone from the prostitutes to the politicians were black, and where black pride was the order of the day. She studied at Howard University with Alain Locke and supported herself by working as a manicurist and maid. When Opportunity knocked, Hurston moved to New York with $1.50 in her pocket. She slept on the couch at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue, attended Barnard College, and worked as the novelist Fannie Hurst’s private secretary.

The age of cooperation and mutual congratulation that the Opportunity and Crisis awards represented came to an end in 1926 with the publication of a novel that few Harlemites seem to have read. The title made sure of that. Nigger Heaven was the fourth novel published by Carl Van Vechten, a forty-six-year-old, rich, white Iowa native who had an unerring sense for the new. He had recently discovered Harlem and become the most prominent of the white slummers—the popular song “Go Harlem” referred to people who “Go inspectin’ / Like Van Vechten.” Carlo, as his friend Langston Hughes called him, squired William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other celebrities on all-night odysseys to rent parties, restaurants, nightclubs, speakeasies, gambling halls, and dance palaces. But Van Vechten, who was so well known and so well liked uptown that he could always count on his wayward hip flask being returned to him by night’s end, was more than yet another interloper. He freely invited Harlemites, high and low, to his midtown home, where they met everyone from Tallulah Bankhead to Rudolph Valentino to Theodore Dreiser. A porter at Grand Central Station is said to have recognized an otherwise anonymous old lady as Mrs. Astor, and when she asked how he knew her name, he replied, “I met you Saturday when we shared bootleg gin at Carl Van Vechten’s.” Countee Cullen told Hughes that Van Vechten was “coining money out of the niggers,” but Van Vechten’s assistance to Harlem’s artists and intellectuals was undeniable. He set up Paul Robeson’s breakthrough concert at Town Hall and helped convince Alfred Knopf to publish James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Rudolph Fisher. His photography and reporting on Harlem and black culture in Vanity Fair, the Smart Set, and Harper’s were crucial efforts in bringing the accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance to a wider public

Nigger Heaven put an end to the fun, at least as far as Van Vechten’s nights uptown were concerned. Many observers have gone so far as to claim that this roman à clef about a young black writer whose descent into lowlife is hastened when he forsakes his librarian girlfriend for an infamous heiress was the beginning of the end of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in the midst of a surge in the number of southern lynchings, even as Jazz Age whites celebrated blacks and black culture, Nigger Heaven became a cultural litmus test, beginning with the title, which referred to the blacks-only balcony section of segregated theaters uptown. Van Vechten was hardly the first person, or even the first white person, to write a serious novel about black people, nor was Van Vechten alone among white American writers in exploring the complex resonances of “the n-word.” Harlemites nonetheless complained that Van Vechten had repaid their generosity with a scorn that was making a rich man even richer. The novel quickly sold a hundred thousand copies and went through thirteen reprintings in two years. Van Vechten was from the start sensitive to the possible responses. He included a footnote at the first use of the word “nigger” that recognized its problematic history and usage, and before publication he showed the manuscript to his closest friends uptown, including Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Rudolph Fisher, in order to test its offensiveness. None found a problem with the book’s title or its contents. Hughes even wrote the blues lyrics that appear at the beginning of every chapter. Nonetheless, Van Vechten was lynched in effigy at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 135th Street, and his book was burned. Du Bois wrote that Nigger Heaven was “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and the intelligence of white,” while Hubert Harrison considered the novel nothing more than an updated minstrel show. Had Van Vechten robbed Harlem of its renaissance? Or had it existed only in the pages of a few downtown literary magazines?

The controversy over Nigger Heaven took place in a rarefied atmosphere that was foreign to most Harlemites. Indeed, what was most significant about the book was not the controversial title but the way it intensified long-standing cultural divisions between old New Negroes who demanded that black art uplift the race and new New Negroes who proposed that racial progress would be fatally compromised by taking race too seriously. As it turned out, there was a third way, pioneered by Wallace Thurman, the most terrible of a generation of enfants terribles. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Thurman worked as a journalist in Los Angeles before moving to Harlem in 1925 “with nothing but his nerve,” according to legend. By early the next year the twenty-four-year-old Thurman was using his position as managing editor of the Messenger to promote the new generation of Harlem writers. Thurman soon gained a reputation as a brilliant artist with a complicated personal life, at once cynical about race and ashamed of his dark skin color. To make things even more complicated, Thurman was freethinking when it came to the sexuality of others but unable to come to terms with his own. He never got over the shame of having been arrested during a gay assignation in a public bathroom shortly after his arrival in New York, even though homosexuality was hardly a scandal uptown, not when gay nightclubs were so popular and when lesbian blues singers were hit makers. Heavy drinking helped Thurman survive—it certainly made him the life of the nonstop party at the rooming house where the next phase of the Harlem Renaissance was born. “Niggerati Manor,” as 267 West 136th Street was known, was home not only to Thurman but to Aaron Douglas and Richard Bruce Nugent, a twenty-year-old writer and artist from Washington, D.C., who was as far out of the closet as Wallace Thurman was in it. Nugent, who wrote some of the earliest gay fiction in American literature, decorated the walls of the house with images of African jungle dwellers in drag.

This hothouse atmosphere attracted Langston Hughes, who spent the summer of 1926 on West 136th Street basking in the success of his first book. Hughes was now America’s Negro poet laureate, and when he talked about racial art, friends and enemies listened. After the ever unpredictable George Schuyler claimed in an article called “The Negro Art Hokum” that race was irrelevant to artists who happened to be black, Hughes responded with “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” an essay arguing that both race fetishists and propagandists on the one hand and subjectivists and aesthetes on the other had it wrong. People were more than their skin color but they denied race at their peril. “No great poet has ever been afraid of being himself,” Hughes wrote. “We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

The increasing ideological and artistic independence exercised by the residents of Niggerati Manor demanded an outlet, and in that magical summer of 1926 Thurman and his roommates started their own literary magazine. FIRE!!: A Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists went on sale later that year and went nowhere. Its outrageous one-dollar cover price was bad enough, but its frank and even prurient embrace of a working-class black bohemian vision was shocking to many readers. Its bold rejection of the political and racial norms of the Talented Tenth led the literary establishment to savage the publication in print and snub its contributors in person. Thurman lost what little money he had on FIRE!! and, after unsold copies were destroyed in, irony of ironies, a warehouse blaze, he had no way to put together a second issue. Yet even before FIRE!! went up in flames its influence was spreading.

In 1927 Harlem saw the opening of a salon called the Dark Tower, with interiors by Richard Bruce Nugent and Aaron Douglas, and copies of Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” and Countee Cullen’s “The Dark Tower” hanging on opposite walls. It was located above the hair parlor and beauty college at 108-10 West 136th Street, which as every Harlemite knew was the mansion that had belonged to America’s “Mahogany Millionairess,” Madame C. J. Walker. After she died in 1919 her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, had become a fixture of Harlem’s boisterous nightlife in a silver turban and harem pants. She turned her surprisingly modest one-bedroom apartment at 80 Edgecombe Avenue into the place where the coffee-colored cream of Harlem’s Talented Tenth, white slummers from downtown, Hollywood stars, and European nobility, as well as her own informal court, mingled with uptown crooks and cads. The Dark Tower was the fulfillment of A’Lelia’s ambitions to become a matron of the arts, which according to the woman whom Langston Hughes called the “Joy Princess of Harlem’s 1920s” meant serving caviar sandwiches and woodcock salad to tuxedoed white folks willing and able to pay.

The vast majority of Harlemites never heard of the Dark Tower, most of those who knew about it couldn’t afford the prices, and many of those who could afford it wouldn’t be caught dead there. Instead, Harlemites patronized the theaters, ballrooms, dance halls, and nightclubs where a parallel Harlem Renaissance was happening, fueled by bootleg liquor and jazz and subsidized by a new generation of white investors. In 1925 an Austrian immigrant named Leo Brecher and a Jewish graduate of City College named Frank Schiffman followed up on their success in turning the Lincoln Theatre into a movie house by taking over Harlem’s “Cradle of Stars,” the famed Lafayette Theatre, and transforming it into an all-black vaudeville house. It was there that a young trumpeter from New Orleans named Louis Armstrong was first introduced to Harlem audiences. The Lafayette’s only real competition at that point was the Renaissance Theatre, at 2341 Seventh Avenue, which was built in 1920 as part of the old Garden of Joy site by William C. Roach, a UNIA-tithing immigrant from Montserrat. In addition to concerts and dances with the best talent that the Negro Mecca had on hand, the Renaissance featured floor shows, gambling, and even basketball—it was the home court of the New York Renaissance Big Five, or the “Rennies,” the first black professional basketball team.

That kind of imaginative programming was key to the success of Harlem’s theaters and dance halls in the 1920s, especially as Latinos began to create their own renaissance. At first, audiences looking for Spanish-language entertainment had to leave El Barrio to find it. The “Teatro Alhambra” produced René Borgia’s En La Calle 116, a play about life in El Barrio, but it was that landmark of Negro Harlem the Apollo Theater that became the most important venue for Spanish-language drama and musical theater uptown, from the classics to out-and-out farces featuring actors in negrito. At first, the Apollo hosted one-shot works in Spanish, but later the management instituted all-day Sunday shows that might include Ramón Reynado’s company performing comedies or even operas with the great Mexican baritone Rodolfo de Hoyos, Cristino Inclán’s Companía de Bufos Cubanos, starring none other than El Gráfico editor Alberto O’Farrill in blackface, or G. Pando’s El Negro Que Tenía El Alma Blanca, “The Negro Who Had a White Soul.” Inspired by the success of Spanish-language works at the Apollo, the East Harlem venues the Jewell Theatre, the Verona, Clairmont Hall, the Teatro San José, and the Teatro Triboro began programming similar works, often featuring the negritos O’Farrill or Jesús Solís as well as other stars such as Juan Rivera or Fortunato Bonanova. A revue at the East Harlem’s Teatro Variedades called Harlem Arrabalero, again starring Alberto O’Farrill, was the definitive Spanish-language version of nocturnal life uptown complete with poverty, violence, and sex.

Less respectable forms of entertainment became even more popular during the 1920s. The Manhattan Casino changed its name to the Rockland Palace and began hosting the annual dances of the Hamilton Lodge of Odd Fellows, which featured not just both whites and blacks but gays and straights cross-dressed every which way. Harlem was distinctly unoffended. Female and male impersonators had long found underground performance opportunities uptown, and in the 1920s Harlem’s “pansy shows” and striptease acts were a few degrees hotter than those available downtown. The most prominent examples of such entertainment were the specialty of a journalist named Billy Minsky, who was descended from a famous eastern European rabbi. Raised on the Lower East Side, Minsky got into the burlesque business with his brothers after the stories he wrote for the New York World about the Becker and Rosenthal case led to an attempt on his life. “Girls, gags, and music” kept seats in the space above the Harlem Opera House called the Little Apollo filled, especially when the shows cost only 75 cents, compared to $4.40 for Ziegfeld’s Follies. One of the most popular acts was Isabelle Van, known as “the sex seeker,” who started her act fully clothed and exited after removing each piece of clothing, reappearing and leaving again, until the patient audience was finally rewarded with a glimpse of one of her breasts. Then there were the relatively mild comic skits, like the one in which a female patient asks a doctor, “What did you do before you were a doctor?” The doctor pats her posterior and answers, “I was a rear admiral.” Eventually audiences demanded racier material. Robert Alda, the father of the actor Alan Alda, became one of Harlem’s “tit serenaders,” so called because they sang between striptease acts. The Minsky brothers began pushing decency boundaries far beyond—or below, in this case—what was allowed anywhere else. “Try to Get In!” the advertisements leered. The dancer Mae Dix had an act in which she appeared before a topless chorus line and stripped away everything but a banana placed strategically between her legs. Even the banana came off as she exited. This was the type of act that led to a police raid in 1925, but when charges were dismissed the Minsky brothers decided to do away with the comedy sketches and focus on the strippers, known as the “Minsky Rosebuds,” which resulted in four sold-out shows a day. It also convinced Hurtig and Seamon’s, next door to the Harlem Opera House, to start presenting risqué acts with talent as young as fifteen years old, and soon other theaters followed suit.

Despite the strong demand for burlesque acts, lavish floor shows set to the music now known as jazz dominated a new generation of nightclubs that opened in the wake of Prohibition. One of the most sophisticated nightspots was a basement space called Connie’s Inn, on Seventh Avenue near West 131st Street, next to the Lafayette Theatre and close to the legendary Tree of Hope, Harlem’s Blarney Stone, where so many black Harlemites in the entertainment business gathered to gossip and trade tips. The owners were a pair of German-Jewish brothers from Harlem, Connie and George Immerman, with an unerring sense of Harlem’s future. Connie’s Inn, which opened in 1923, was one of the first new Harlem jazz clubs with a whites-only policy, and not just any whites but an international array of the rich and famous. The New York Age was skeptical: “Immerman’s is opened to Slummers; sports; ‘coke’ addicts, and high rollers of the white race who come to Harlem to indulge in illicit and illegal recreations.” Later the club became a “black and tan” establishment, letting in light-skinned colored customers after hours. Harlemites were willing to bear such indignities because the entertainment was worth it, especially the club’s floor shows. Fats Waller, who had once worked for the Immermans as a delivery boy when they were the humble owners of a delicatessen, wrote four shows each year with his lyricist, Andy Razaf, a native of Washington, D.C., who preached from a 135th Street stepladder against the use of the terms “nigger,” “darky,” and “coon” before joining up with Waller and writing the songs like “Honeysuckle Rose” and “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” They also worked on a larger scale. Their most successful effort was the show Hot Chocolates, which featured Edith Wilson and Louis Armstrong and did so well that it calved a Broadway version with an onstage imitation of Connie’s Inn, complete with guests and waiters onstage and a version of the club’s “Sun-Tanned Beauty Chorus,” which included men in drag.

The splendors of Connie’s Inn are remembered today only by aficionados of jazz history, but almost anyone who knows anything about the history of New York City is familiar with the unique synthesis of racism and art achieved at the Cotton Club. The space had been a dance club called Douglas Hall before being taken over by Jack Johnson in 1920 and then by the gangster Owney “The Killer” Madden and his secret backer, Al Capone. At the Cotton Club, which officially opened in 1923 at the northeast corner of Lenox Avenue and West 142nd Street, the music had to compete with the decor, which was the work of the modernist designer Joseph Urban, who outfitted the space to resemble an old-time plantation, from the log cabin–themed stairs outside to the murals that depicted slave shacks and cotton fields, while the stage itself was modeled after the veranda of a slave owner’s mansion. The Cotton Club revues, which were written by white Broadway and Tin Pan Alley composers, featured twenty café-au-lait-colored girl singers and dancers. There were even white women who passed for colored in order to earn a princely $50 per week. The most famous member of the chorus was Lena Horne, who was so young when she first started that her mother came along and made sure she did her homework between shows. The Cotton Club inspired imitators like the Catagonia Club, also known as Pod and Jerry’s, a one-room speakeasy that opened in 1925 at 166 West 133rd Street—the entire block was known as Jungle Alley—and featured more reasonable prices than the Cotton Club. The owners also introduced a more progressive racial policy, attracting celebrities who had gone to high school in Harlem just a few blocks away, such as Tallulah Bankhead and many musicians, including Billie Holiday, who failed her audition as a dancer in 1927 but wowed the owners with her singing.

Despite the talent onstage and the bootleg alcohol at the tables, things at the Cotton Club didn’t really begin to swing until the arrival of an ambitious young pianist and bandleader from Washington, D.C., named Duke Ellington. Born in 1899 into a family of middle-class strivers—his father was a servant at the White House—Ellington came to New York City in 1923. At the Lafayette, “America’s Leading Colored Theatre,” Ellington worked with Wilbur Sweatman’s orchestra as part of a vaudeville show, complete with dancers, comics, and acrobats before breaking out to lead his own group. White audiences looking for “sweet” sounds and blacks hungry for “hot” tunes loved the way Ellington orchestrated the piano gestures of the uptown ticklers, turning a midsized ragtime ensemble into an jazz orchestra capable of frantic grace in “East St. Louis Toodle-o” and languorous sophistication in “Mood Indigo.” It was Ellington’s gig at the Cotton Club starting in December of 1927—“Be big or you’ll be dead,” Owney Madden told him—that turned the Jazz Age into the Swing Era and put Harlem permanently on the map of American music. Ellington’s pioneering balance between song and solo, between the composer’s vision and the instrumentalist’s touch, mirrored the productive oppositions and tensions of the American experiment itself. It was largely due to Ellington that the Cotton Club became the most exclusive club in the city. There was a “royal box” kept at the ready for Mayor Jimmy Walker—his uptown constituents, whose skin color was too dark and whose pocketbooks were too light to get past the bouncers, had to make do with radio broadcasts from the club sponsored by Moe Levy’s West 149th Street clothing shop.

If Connie’s Inn was known for its floor shows, and the Cotton Club was known for its music, the place for dancing was the Savoy Ballroom, a massive hall at 596 Lenox Avenue that gave rise to one of the key songs of the Swing Era, “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” by Andy Razaf and Edgar Sampson. A black real estate speculator named Charles Buchanan, backed by a Jewish luggage manufacturer turned talent scout named Moe Gale, opened the club in 1926 to enormous fanfare. Named after London’s famed Savoy Hotel, it didn’t look like much from the outside but the inside was spectacular. Taking up a full city block, it held up to five thousand people and allowed most of them to dance at the same time on its 250- by 50-foot polished maple dance floor. The Savoy was alone among the big clubs uptown in racially integrating both its dance floor and its twin bandstands. The 50-cent admission charge was low enough to allow elevator operators and domestics to mingle with celebrities the likes of George Gershwin, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Sergei Eisenstein, Le Corbusier, and the Prince of Wales.

The Track, as the Savoy’s dance floor was known, became the premier dance hall in the country—Lana Turner famously dubbed the club “the home of happy feet.” A dozen hostesses offered 10-cent dances, but more often than not the customers would be the ones offering instruction in the gravity-defying Lindy Hop, a dance that got its name after Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic crossing, as well as in the moves called the Camelback, the Shimmy, the Stomp, and the Jitterbug Jive. Nowhere else in Harlem was the connection between dancers and musicians as symbiotic, and every major orchestra based in or passing through New York played there. But no Savoy headliner was more beloved than Fletcher Henderson. Born in 1897 in Georgia into a middle-class black family that steered him toward both art and science, Henderson graduated from Atlanta University and came to New York in 1920 to study chemistry, but racial discrimination made finding work as a pharmacist impossible. He supported himself by working as a song plugger, producer, and featured artist for Harry Pace and W. C. Handy. By mid-1924 he was gigging in midtown and helping to move jazz beyond ragtime and dixieland styles and into big band swing. Henderson’s songs—among them, “Christopher Columbus,” “Clarinet Marmalade,” and “Prince of Wails”—rejected the sweet style favored by white bands in favor of a hot style that provided a precise and sophisticated but hard-swinging context for thrilling soloists like Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. It all came together in the musical confrontations—rent party cutting contests writ large—known as battles of the bands, events that became so emotionally charged that the Savoy’s owners more than once had to call in the city’s riot squad.

The only other major racially integrated venue uptown was Smalls Paradise, which opened in late 1925 at Seventh Avenue and West 135th Street under the ownership of Ed Smalls, the South Carolina–born grandson of the Civil War hero Robert Smalls. He came north and worked as an elevator operator before opening the Sugar Cane Club, a basement space at Fifth Avenue and 135th Street that had been one of the first Harlem nightspots to court whites from downtown. His next venture, Smalls Paradise, could hold up to fifteen hundred people and usually did, partly because there was no door charge and patrons didn’t pay champagne prices for seltzer. While a typical night for four at Connie’s Inn cost $50, the equivalent of a week’s paycheck for lucky Harlemites, revelers who came to Smalls to see the bands of Charlie Johnson, Fletcher Henderson, Willie “The Lion” Smith, or James P. Johnson spent less than half of that.

Harlem nightlife in the 1920s was by no means dominated by huge, swanky clubs filled with champagne-swigging, tuxedoed downtowners. Duke Ellington’s sidemen drank with white celebrities like Mae West and Paul Whiteman at the Nest Club, only one of a number of smaller, affordable, mixed-race all-night spots on West 133rd Street. None was more popular than the Lenox Club, which opened in 1925 next to the Cotton Club. A 7 a.m. whistle meant that patrons, including the actor Harold Lloyd and the writer Walter Winchell, who had grown up in Harlem, needed to finish breakfast and go to work. Then there were clubs that were just a few notches above rent parties. The Cellar Café, run by an ex-boxer named Edmond Johnson and later known as Edmond’s Cellar, was a basement dive at Fifth Avenue and 132nd Street that opened around the end of World War I and featured the young Ethel Waters, who later remembered the dirty, dangerous, and disreputable club as “the last stop on the way down.” Many of Harlem’s least reputable clubs featured transvestite acts known as “pansy parades.” While the Ubangi Club attracted crowds of gays and lesbians, “Queeriosities” ruled the Clam House, a West 133rd Street dive owned by a lesbian named Gladys Bentley, who dressed up as a man and performed double entendre numbers while she flirted with women in the audience. One male performer even dressed up as Gloria Swanson and wowed audiences with the risqué song “Hot Nuts.”

No matter how fancy the decor, no matter how exclusive the clientele, no matter how good the music and dancing, all of Harlem’s nightclubs counted on the thirst for alcohol that gripped the nation during Prohibition. In addition to the nightclubs, which marked up booze by a thousand percent or more, much of which went to paying off cops and judges, hundreds of bakeries, cigar stores, and delis sold liquor under the counter. Parts of Harlem had been known as vice districts since the nineteenth century, but now uptown Manhattan became synonymous with all manner of crime. A New York Times article from 1926 called “Strange Crimes of Little Africa” claimed that most of Harlem’s 250,000 residents found their neighborhoods safe and orderly before going on to chronicle uptown’s never-ending epidemic of blood-soaked crimes of passion.

Prohibition helped passion of another sort remain profitable. The notorious West 141st Street whorehouse called the Daisy Chain was only one of some sixty bordellos uptown, more than in any other city neighborhood. In addition to their “daughters of joy,” whorehouses and after-hours clubs were also prime places to score illegal drugs, especially marijuana, though “vipers” could also buy joints right out in the open under the Tree of Hope. Such activity was possible, of course, only with the assistance of the police, many of whom got rich by ignoring petty dealers such as Mezz Mezzrow, Louis Armstrong’s connection, and by looking the other way at Kaiser’s, a “tea pad” in the basement of 212 West 133rd Street.

Of course, the real money was in organized crime, and everyone knew it. The Cotton Club’s owner Owney Madden rode around Harlem in a bullet-proof Dusenberg and arranged for the curbside murder of his competition Barron Wilkins, who had moved on to run the Executive Club. The biggest bootlegger of them all, Arnold Rothstein, kept a lower profile, investing in Harlem real estate as a way to launder money and backing the shows Keep Shufflin’ and Hot Chocolates. Rothstein was also responsible for turning an Italian-born juvenile delinquent named Francesco Castiglia into the archetypal Jazz Age gangster. Born in Calabria in 1891, he followed his father to America several years later. “Sell everything,” the old man had written back to the old country. “Don’t forget the red peppers. Bring a lot of them.” Castiglia’s mother heeded the advice, and the family was even able to open a food store in East Harlem. Francesco Castiglia was renamed Frank Costello and grew up at 234 East 108th Street, in the heart of the Italian ghetto. This enterprising youth got a job delivering telegraphs and was soon gambling and shooting craps. He was barely into his teens when Rothstein took him under his wing, and soon Costello was splitting his winnings with cops in return for protection. From there it was a short step to helping politicians buy votes and becoming the biggest bootlegger in the country.

While white gangsters concentrated on bootlegging, black criminals got into illegal gambling. Casper Holstein, a native of Saint Croix, owned the Lenox Club, the Saratoga Club, and the Turf Club, but most of his profits came from an informal West Indian gambling scam called bolito, which he expanded into the numbers, also known as policy gambling. Harlemites would bet their hard-earned nickels and dimes on a lucky number and hope it matched the figure that represented the daily volume at the New York Stock Exchange. The odds of winning were 900 to 1, even as Holstein paid off at a rate of 600 to 1. The difference—up to $15,000 a day—paid the salaries of an army of employees who would take bets, transport cash, and count and launder money. It made Holstein one of the first African-American millionaires, known to blow up to $35,000 in a single afternoon at the track. Sometimes he put his money to better use, investing in real estate and donating large sums to Fisk and Howard universities, as well as to Democratic politicians. He funded homes for destitute girls in Liberia and India and helped relief efforts after hurricanes in the West Indies. Closer to home, Holstein founded Harlem’s Elks Lodge #45, built a private sanatorium, and backed Opportunity’s prize competitions for literature. After the fall of Marcus Garvey, Holstein even bought Liberty Hall and gave it back to the UNIA. But Holstein’s dominance didn’t last. Dozens of Harlem gangsters were soon copying his business model, among them a Puerto Rican immigrant named Henry Miro who arrived in El Barrio in 1916 at the age of fourteen and became the neighborhood “banker,” giving his employees buttons bearing the letter M, I, R, or O as a way of tipping off the cops. There was enough to go around until Arnold Rothstein’s protégé, Dutch Schultz, left to form his own gang. He looked to his stomping grounds of Jewish Harlem and recruited Luke Rosenkranz and Bo Weinberg to be his gunmen and Abbadabba Berman to do the books. They used coffins to smuggle whiskey and gin into the Harlem funeral home he owned and then sold it at Connie’s Inn, where he was a secret investor. In 1928 he kidnapped Holstein in broad daylight on West 146th Street and held him for $50,000 ransom. Five days later Holstein was released, having turned over the bulk of his operations to Schultz. The rest of Harlem’s black numbers kingpins got the message, with the exception of “Madame” Stephanie St. Clair, the so-called Queen of Policy, a native of Martinique who spoke fluent French as she continued to direct dozens of numbers runners from her apartment at 409 Edgecombe Avenue.

Harlem’s churches led the fight against “drink, drugs, dice, and dance,” and leading the leaders was the legendary Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, who was born in Virginia in 1865 to a black and Native American ex-slave and a white German slaveholder and grew up in a one-room shack. After he got saved at the age of twenty he went to college, law school, and theological seminary, and in 1908 he took over the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which had been founded downtown a century earlier by visiting Ethiopians who had rebelled against the racial segregation enforced in New York’s churches and moved uptown. He was distressed to learn that his son, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., kept getting kicked off the informal baseball field occupied by an Italian farmer who raised goats at 136 West 138th Street—it had been part of a whites-only outdoor nightclub called Mamie Smith’s Garden of Joy that Vertner Tandy built on a large rocky outcropping—but the reverend was overjoyed to have discovered at last the perfect place to build a new church. Powell oversaw the completion in 1923 of a massive neo-Gothic church that immediately attracted some of the wealthiest and lightest-skinned Negro Baptists in the city. The church grew so quickly that Powell, a towering, dashing man with a famously energetic and distinctive preaching style—unlike most of his colleagues, he did not improvise—publicly burned its mortgage after just four years. By the end of the decade the Abyssinian Baptist Church was the biggest and most influential black religious institution in the country, because Powell saw religion not as a matter of private spirituality but as a public calling. A disciple of Booker T. Washington, Powell had helped organize the NAACP and the Urban League, and he made sure the church focused on community service, offering everything from financial assistance to clothing and food banks to sports and education. There was even a summer camp and a missionary operation in Africa.

Many preachers tried to imitate Powell’s success. Just a year after the Abyssinian Baptist Church moved uptown, the Mother AME Zion Church’s Reverend George W. Fraser outdid Powell by hiring the black architect George W. Foster to build a neo-Gothic building on West 137th Street, while the King’s Chapel Pentecostal Assembly hired Vertner Tandy to build a modernist home on Fifth Avenue. But taking advantage of white flight was more common. Salem Methodist Episcopal Church took over the all-white Metropolitan Methodist Episcopal Church, while Temple Israel became Mount Olivet Baptist Church. Even the old Harlem Casino got religion and was transformed into the Refuge Temple of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, the storefront churches and basement salvation temples, such as the Live-Ever-Die-Never Church and the Metaphysical Church of the Divine Investigation, were more popular than ever, even though many of them seemed to specialize in relieving congregants of any money they had left over after playing the numbers. Just down the food chain from the storefront churches were itinerant preachers, for example, Elder Clayhorn Martin, known as the “Barefoot Prophet,” a one-man religion who wandered in long white robes from rent party to pool hall calculating the wages of sin uptown. Then there were the “obi men” who sold herbs, roots, powders, charms, and conjurations that promised to heal everything from teething pain to broken hearts.

Since the established Harlem Catholic houses of worship considered Latin Americans even more suspect—which is to say less white—than Italians, Latino churches were slow to take root and located mostly in West Harlem. The first Spanish-language church uptown, Iglesia Luterana Sion, was founded in 1873 in the old St. Johannes Kirche, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that the residents of El Barrio started building their own Spanish-language Catholic churches, including St. Cecilia, Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, and Holy Agony. Like their Italian neighbors, Puerto Ricans made up for the lack of their own churches by bringing their religion into the streets, marking Good Friday with a parade that reenacted the stations of the cross.

To many Harlemites, black and Latino, it seemed as if a new era was just getting under way, with the rise of a new generation of religious and political leaders, the reinvention of American popular music and dance in the clubs of Jungle Alley and the dance palaces of Lenox Avenue, and the arrival of a new crop of black novelists, playwrights, and poets. Events proved otherwise. After Marcus Garvey went to jail in 1925, the UNIA was increasingly focused on expanding into other cities and even overseas. Garvey’s link to Harlem was permanently severed in 1927, when he was expelled from the United States and began a journey that took him back to Jamaica and then to England, where he died at the age of fifty-three, never having stepped foot on African soil. Garvey left a complicated legacy. Doubters claimed he was nothing more than a lucky man, in the right place at the right time with the right message. Many Harlemites still revere this poorly educated and coal-black West Indian immigrant who became an international apostle of racial pride by reinventing the black past, translating that ideology into practice by standing up to Harlem’s café au lait establishment, and building from scratch a political machine that offered an alternative to the two-party political system that held back Negroes. “Tragic,” like “genius,” was a much-abused word in Harlem in the 1920s. Garvey, whose downfall was J. Edgar Hoover’s first success, was both.

Garvey’s departure was only the first in a string of losses that Harlem suffered starting in the mid-1920s. His unruly disciple Hubert Harrison, one of the most brilliant and charismatic of the stepladder speakers at the outdoor university along Lenox Avenue, who insisted that there never was such a thing as a Harlem Renaissance, died in 1927 at the age of forty-four of appendicitis. Another blow came the next year, when Claude McKay, who had encountered an enthusiastic welcome in the Soviet Union, realized that communism would always put class before race and published a novel to put both in disturbing perspective. Home to Harlem pulled no punches when it came to the downside of living uptown, which helped it become one of the first black best sellers. White critics loved the book but, with the exception of James Weldon Johnson, the Negro Mecca’s literati gave it a ferocious reception. After the Inter-State Tattler claimed the novel “out-niggered Mr. Van Vechten,” McKay left Harlem for good. The fuss over Home to Harlem almost eclipsed the appearance of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, a mixed-race melodrama that came out that same year to enthusiastic reviews. Larsen, a mysteriously secretive nurse and librarian who had been discovered by Jessie Fauset, followed that achievement a year later with Passing, still considered the definitive fictional treatment of the moral and psychological perils of crossing the color line, but by the end of the decade Larsen was anxious to get away from Harlem. A Guggenheim award in 1930—she was the first black fellow in the institution’s history—allowed Larsen to spend two years in Europe, but accusations of plagiarism followed her, and though she returned to Harlem her literary career was over. A similar fate awaited Jean Toomer, whose obsessive search for racelessness was traceable not just to a childhood spent on the color line but to a growing interest in the arcane philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, whose insistence on inner and outer transcendence was attracting converts among America’s bohemian classes. Toomer was struggling to bring Gurdjieff uptown when, in 1926, he experienced a spiritual awakening while standing on a midtown subway platform. It marked the end of his commitment to Harlem and to race in general.

Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer had personal reasons for staying away. Many of their old friends and colleagues had professional reasons for leaving, answering the call of Fisk University, which decimated the ranks of the Negro Mecca’s Talented Tenth. Located in Nashville, Tennessee, Fisk was a small, out-of-the-way school, but the prospect of regular paychecks was a powerful attraction. Over the next decade the school cherry-picked Harlem’s finest, including Charles Johnson, whose program of cultural uplift at Opportunity was no longer supported by the Urban League. James Weldon Johnson followed up the publication in 1930 of Black Manhattan, a groundbreaking work of African-American history, by moving to Nashville, though he came back each fall to his home at 187 West 135th Street. His death in a 1938 car crash robbed black America of its most authoritative voice. Fisk also claimed Arna Bontemps, a Seventh Day Adventist who came from Los Angeles to Harlem after being discovered by Jessie Fauset. Aaron Douglas managed to complete murals at New York’s Ebony Club, the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, and the Harlem YMCA before moving to Nashville.

Harlem lost some of its most distinctive remaining talents to tragically early deaths. The actor Charles Gilpin died drunk and impoverished in 1930 at the age of fifty-two. He was hardly the first New Negro undone by booze and bigotry. After the disaster of FIRE!!, Wallace Thurman was undeterred, writing a hit Broadway play and publishing two novels, The Blacker the Berry, which was the first black novel to take skin color as its subject, and Infants of the Spring, a roman à clef that was the first novel ever written expressly for a black readership. It came as no surprise to Thurman to see that the latter was unenthusiastically received. How could a novel whose opening scene includes a gay, interracial pickup scene reach a large readership? Always a heavy drinker, Thurman’s health declined, and the wild, racially mixed rent parties he threw at his home on West 139th Street were more than once broken up by his drunken suicide attempts. Just a few days after Thurman succumbed to tuberculosis in 1934, Harlemites learned of the death of another of their most distinctive literary voices. For much of the decade Rudolph Fisher spent his days in a white medical coat and his nights in a tuxedo, taking in the club and cabaret scene. In between, he also published two novels, The Walls of Jericho, a dauntingly cynical look at skin color and real estate uptown, and The Conjure Man Dies, the first black detective novel. But his career as a doctor and a writer was cut short when he died at the age of thirty-seven from intestinal cancer, apparently caused by years of exposure to X-rays.

The glory days weren’t quite over. In 1928 Countee Cullen shocked everyone by taking a wife, and not just any wife. In a sundown ceremony at his father’s Salem Methodist Church, Cullen married Nina Yolande Du Bois, the only surviving child of the father of them all. It had all the trappings of a royal union, but the marriage was disastrous: Cullen was gay and Yolande was in love with the bandleader Jimmy Lunceford. A divorce was inevitable, and Cullen’s writing suffered. His one and only novel, One Way to Heaven, was brushed aside. Du Bois didn’t even commission a review in the Crisis. It was payback, no doubt, to a wayward son-in-law. Cullen took a job teaching French and English at P.S. 139, also known as Frederick Douglass Junior High School, at 140th Street near Lenox Avenue, and moved to the suburbs.

Cullen’s onetime best friend Langston Hughes was one of the few who stayed in Harlem and went on to greater things. The crown prince of the Harlem Renaissance published his second volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew, in 1927. Many critics and readers were put off, not just by the title but by the way in which these new poems frankly confronted the realities of Negro life in Harlem. Reviews in the Negro periodicals were unforgiving—one called uptown’s poet laureate a sewer-dwelling “poet low-rate”—but that was the least of his problems. Hughes was now being seen on the arm of Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy, elderly white widow infatuated with all things Negro, who believed that only the primitive “child races” could save Western civilization from the catastrophes of white reason and order. The rhetoric made Harlemites cringe, but Mason’s belief in the regenerative function of the arts of Africa and its diaspora was shared by many distinguished minds, black and white. Her cash handouts to her “little boys and girls” were also convincing, for a time. Although Paul Robeson and Jean Toomer resisted her invitations, Hughes, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Richmond Barthé, Aaron Douglas, and Zora Neale Hurston all sat at her feet while she held forth from on high. Eventually Hughes got fed up with Mason’s suggestions about the kind of poetry he should write and what kind of music he should listen to and what kind of politicians he should vote for. He broke with her in the summer of 1930, realizing that of all the white negrophiles of the Harlem Renaissance Mason had been the most dangerous, because she was the most generous.

Slightly depressed by the break with his mother figure, Hughes became positively ill after he lost his sister figure, having clashed with Zora Neale Hurston over a play they tried to write together. What little writing Hughes did during the period he called his “personal crash” found little support. Even as the Crisis was handing out awards for literature, Du Bois, like Charles Johnson, was having doubts about the role that the arts should play in improving the lot of America’s Negroes. Du Bois began to turn the Crisis from an effete journal of rhymed, introspective racial musings alongside lynching statistics, news about baby contests, and advertisements for skin lighteners into a serious forum for discussions of economics and politics. By 1929 the journal had phased out its cultural project altogether. Unable to get a job in publishing—who wanted to hire a single, black woman in her forties?—Jessie Fauset had to take a job teaching French at DeWitt Clinton High School. Eventually, like so many of her peers, she left Harlem altogether, moving to New Jersey and giving up on writing.

Despite all the death, defection, and dissension, the Harlem Renaissance took years to fade away. As late as 1934 the socialite slummer Nancy Cunard brought out The Negro Anthology, which introduced a new generation to the cultural pluralism of Alain Locke’s New Negro, but by then it was clear that philanthropy, politics, and gin had done poisonous work. Most of those Harlem Renaissance writers with the discipline to make a career out of literature—Jessie Fauset, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larsen, Arna Bontemps, Rudolph Fisher, Claude McKay, Walter White, and W.E.B. Du Bois—lacked a first-rate imagination, or died too young, or gave up too soon. Superior talents such as Jean Toomer or Eric Walrond failed to create a substantial body of work, while the geniuses Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Duke Ellington had yet to reach their peak. Was this really a bona fide artistic movement or was it simply a fortuitous gathering of individual talent with little more in common than the color of their skin and the neighborhood in which they were more or less forced to live for a time?

If there really was a Harlem Renaissance, determining its time of death is as difficult as discovering its moment of birth. Pessimists thought the party was over as early as 1925, even as the New York Herald Tribune announced that the country was “on the edge, if not already in the midst, of what might not improperly be called a Negro renaissance.” Claude McKay, who coined the term “Negro metropolis,” believed that even before the mid-1920s Harlem had turned into “an all white picnic ground with no apparent gain to the blacks.” In 1927 Rudolph Fisher wrote an article called “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” arguing that the New Negro Renaissance was nothing more than a blackface revolution, a rage for exotica and primitivism. That opinion was confirmed the next year by a study showing that eighty-one of eighty-five uptown speakeasies were owned by whites. Alain Locke claimed that the Harlem Renaissance had been “scuttled from within,” but the continued dominance of “vice, dice, and lice” uptown made the question of beginnings and endings of less interest to Langston Hughes. All talk about racial art and racial assertion aside, he knew that Harlemites were still prisoners of segregation. Central Harlem’s population was more than two hundred thousand in 1929, an increase of as much as 500 percent in just three decades. Almost 97 percent of the neighborhood was now black, its residents largely unable to live, work, shop, or play anywhere else. What came in between was for the most part irrelevant since, as Hughes avowed, “Ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance.”

8“THE KINGDOM OF CULTURE”

8
“THE KINGDOM OF CULTURE”