On the Shoulders of Giants Read online

  The tide of Negro migration, northward and city-ward, is not to be fully explained as a blind flood started by the demands of war industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, or by the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest. Neither labor demand, the boll-weevil nor the Ku Klux Klan is a basic factor, however contributory any or all of them have been. The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the Northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.

  Harlem was to be the model of this “modern” America, where blacks arrived daily to get a taste of the life they had rarely dared to demand, but only to imagine. Blacks didn’t come to Harlem just to get away from something bad, they were actually choosing to rush toward something good: a place where they would form a “common consciousness,” as Locke put it, adding, “In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital…. Without pretense to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.”

  The Real Harlem:

  Life in the Black Lane

  When migrant the Reverend Betty Neal arrived in Harlem, she thought her dreams had come true: “[When we first arrived,] Bubba and me thought Harlem was Heaven, all the lights and the sights. I asked my aunt, ‘Where do all the white people live?’” Statistically, Harlem was only 30 percent black in the 1920s, but those lived in all-black communities, with black storeowners, black real estate agents, and even some black police officers. Those who had moved to Harlem felt they were among their own—in a small city where they could, at long last, relax. Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar saw Harlem as “the center of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom of the world.”

  Though Harlem was far from the paradise that many migrants hoped for, it was a lively community bristling with new life, new ideas, and new hope for blacks everywhere. Among the millions of hopefuls who came North, many were the musicians, writers, and artists that would form the core of the Harlem Renaissance, including such notables as writer Zora Neale Hurston (from Florida), jazz musician Louis Armstrong (from Louisiana; see the chapter “ ‘Musical Fireworks’: Jazz Lights Up the Heavens of Harlem”), and sculptor Augusta Savage (from Florida). The Northern migration became so widespread that it also swept up many blacks arriving from the West Indies, including Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay and Bob Douglas, founder of the world champion Renaissance Big Five (the Rens) basketball team (see the chapter “ ‘Fairness Creeps out of the Soul’: Basketball Comes to Harlem”). In Harlem, these artists, authors, and entrepreneurs were not only welcomed, but they flourished, achieving the kind of success that would not otherwise have been possible. In Harlem, they had more than a home—they had a purpose.

  But once again, there were two Harlems sharing the same space. One was the Harlem that the writers, intellectuals, and artists envisioned as a shining city on the hill, a black Camelot in which they were valiant knights fighting for the cause of “might for right” instead of the usual “white might makes right.” The other Harlem was the microcosm of what life in America was like for the average workaday African-American. Those that saw the black Camelot were imagining the black America that they hoped would someday be. Writer Max Ewing rhapsodized, “Harlem is the one place that is gay and delightful however dull and depressing the downtown regions may be. Nothing affects the vitality and the freshness of Harlem.” But others would have snorted at such romanticized words, especially those who struggled for their daily bread unaware of any damn Renaissance, seeing only the microcosm, black America as it now was. Yet, what made Harlem so unique and so influential was that it embraced both visions and, as a result, actually was able, at least in part, to make all of black America a little more like black Camelot.

  Harlem was much too complex to be characterized by any one group of people or their visions of what Harlem should or could be. Physically, Harlem was about two square miles that resembled the shape of Utah. St. Nicholas Avenue between 114th Street and 156th Street formed the west border, 114th Street the south border, and the Harlem River the border to the north and east. Contained within these borders were the five major neighborhoods of Harlem, each with a distinctive personality: Seventh Avenue, Lenox Avenue, Strivers’ Row, 135th Street, and 125th Street.

  Seventh Avenue:

  The Great Black Way

  Seventh Avenue, the widest and most attractive of Harlem’s avenues, was also known as the Great Black Way because it represented all that was attractive and cultured about Harlem. One could stand on the bricks of 125th Street and gaze all the way up to 145th Street. The lush trees and flowers planted on the median presented a virtual Garden of Eden. This paradise included not only the most prestigious churches in Harlem but also its greatest theaters, such as the Alhambra, the Lafayette, and the Roosevelt. It also boasted Harlem’s ritziest hotel, the Teresa. Seventh Avenue also had its intellectual side, housing the offices of several leftist magazines as well as prominent bookstores: the Blyden and the National bookstores, both specializing in African and African-American books. Ironically, paradise’s music was provided by the famed nightclub Connie’s Inn at Seventh Avenue and 131st Street, which featured music by Fats Waller, but which also catered only to white patrons.

  So beautiful was Seventh Avenue that it was Harlem’s most popular parade route. Civic leader Marcus Garvey led the followers of his Universal Negro Improvement Association down this street, as did Father Divine, who was not only a popular civil rights activist, but also one of Harlem’s wealthiest landlords. A funeral procession down Seventh Avenue proved the deceased had been a person of some prominence.

  Sundays on Seventh Avenue brought out the best in people. Residents from all classes dressed in their finest clothes to simply stroll down the street. As Harlem Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson wrote, “This was not simply going out for a walk; it is like going out for an adventure.” Activist Malcolm X, a onetime resident of Harlem, echoed that sentiment: “Up and down along and between Lenox and Seventh and Eighth Avenues, Harlem was like some technicolor bazaar.” Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman’s 1928 account of Seventh Avenue in “Negro Life in New York’s Harlem” still provides the most vivid description:

  Negro Harlem is best represented by Seventh Avenue…. It is a grand thoroughfare into which every element of Harlem population ventures either for reasons of pleasure or of business…. Seventh Avenue is majestic yet warm, and it reflects both the sordid chaos and the rhythmic splendor of Harlem. From five o’clock in the evening until way past midnight, Seventh Avenue is one electric-lit line of brilliance and activity, especially during the spring, summer and early fall months. Dwelling houses are close, overcrowded and dark. Seventh Avenue is the place to seek relief. People everywhere. Lines of people in front of the box offices of the Lafayette Theater at 132nd Street, the Renaissance motion picture theaters at 138th Street and the Roosevelt Theater at 145th Street. Knots of people in front of the Metropolitan Baptist Church at 129th Street and Salem M.E. Church, which dominates the corner at 129th Street. People going into the cabarets. People going into speakeasies and saloons…. It is a civilized lane with primitive traits, Harlem’s most representative street.

  Seventh Avenue was indeed Harlem’s Garden of Eden, filled with people trying to show what was best about their community. And every Sunday it paraded the spiritual hopes of Harlem for all to see—and emulate.

  Leno
x Avenue: Jungle Alley

  Seventh Avenue may have represented Harlem’s spirit and soul, but it was Lenox Avenue that was Harlem’s loins, exuding sensuality from every street corner and alleyway. When the sun went down, every deadly sin came out and danced openly in the streets. Brightly lit nightclubs and speakeasies tempted all within sight to enter and taste the forbidden fruits. This was the place Collier’s magazine was referring to when in the twenties it described Harlem as “a national synonym for naughtiness” and a “jungle of jazz.”

  Yet, apart from the glitzy nightclubs, the rest of Lenox Avenue was mired in a sweaty struggle for daily survival. All those wonderful new apartment buildings that had been erected during the building boom were now being rented at rates much higher than comparable apartments anywhere else in Manhattan. These extortionary rates were being charged by both white and black landlords. To make things worse, the apartments were being rented to people who, on average, made less money than whites who were paying less in rent. To afford to live in these apartments, the tenants subdivided their apartments, subletting rooms or even floor space to other families. The result was massive overcrowding that left entire blocks with inadequate sanitation, high rates of unemployment, and even higher rates of crime. Once again, Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman provides a vibrant account:

  Lenox Avenue knows the rumble of the subway and the rattle of the crosstown street car. It is always crowded, crowded with pedestrians seeking the subway or the street car, crowded with idlers from the many pool halls and dives along its line of march, crowded with men and women from the slum district which it borders on the west and Fifth Avenue borders on the east. Lenox Avenue is Harlem’s Bowery. It is dirty and noisy, its buildings ill-used, and made shaky by the subway underneath. At 140th Street it makes its one bid for respectability. On one corner there is Tabb’s Restaurant and Grill, one of Harlem’s most delightful and respectable eating houses; across the street is the Savoy building, housing a first-class dance hall, a motion picture theater and many small business establishments behind its stucco front. But above 141st Street Lenox Avenue gets mean and squalid, deprived of even its crowds of people, and finally peters out into a dirt pile, before leading to a carbarn at 147th St.

  But that wasn’t the part of Lenox Avenue that visitors came to see. White tourists were drawn to Harlem to experience not the Garden of Eden of Seventh Avenue, but Lenox Avenue’s Jungle Alley, with all the dark moral chaos the word jungle implies. This is where eager whites and blacks alike came in large numbers to have their most sensuous desires fulfilled, from the simple thrills of gambling and illegal speakeasies (during the Prohibition era, 1919–33), to the darker needs of hard drugs and harder prostitutes. Thurman explained the attraction: “To call yourself a New Yorker you must have been to Harlem at least once. Every up-to-date person knows Harlem, and knowing Harlem generally means that one has visited a night club or two. These night clubs are now enjoying much publicity along with the New Negro and Negro art. They are the shrines to which white sophisticates, Greenwich Village artists, Broadway revellers and provincial commuters make eager pilgrimage.”

  The fancy nightclubs of Lenox Avenue were the painted face of Harlem that most white outsiders saw. To many, Lenox Avenue was a nonstop party celebrating all things African-American, from the music to the food to the dance. This aspect of the black lifestyle inspired important artists of the time, including Archibald Motley and Palmer Hayden. Many blacks believed that the whites that came to Lenox Avenue to experience this joyous and artistic side of black culture could not help but see just how rich and diverse of a people they truly were. Surely that would go a long way toward promoting better race relations. Unfortunately, beneath the romanticized frivolity of Jungle Alley lurked a harsher, more terrifying truth. There were indeed two Harlems: one that did celebrate African-American culture and heritage, and one that exploited and abused it.

  Jungle Alley, also known as The Street, Paradise Valley, and The Stroll, had the highest density of nightclubs and cabarets in New York City. And certainly nightclubs filled with dancing girls, famous jazz musicians, mobsters, illegal booze, and international celebrities are much more romantic than some intense young writer quietly sitting in his room scribbling about the unjust plight of the Negro. But these famous, and infamous, clubs did as much damage as good to the cause of the African-American. While they promoted and celebrated the original music of black Americans, they also promoted a false, rose-colored image that kept white America from recognizing the real problems faced by African-Americans in Harlem and across the country.

  This was the notorious area that had become popularized in literature because anything was for sale here, and to keep the customers flocking in, Lenox Avenue maintained a Picture of Dorian Gray persona. If visitors focused on the many ritzy nightclubs that featured dynamic jazz and dancing revues, this section of Harlem seemed giddy with innocent celebration of life. But if they looked in on the buildings where the locals lived, they’d catch a glimpse of the nastier soul of the place—the run-down apartment houses and dilapidated buildings hidden in the dark shadows cast by the bright lights of the resplendent nightclubs.

  But no one was interested in looking in those shadows.

  These two Harlems were characterized by two of Jungle Alley’s most famous, but radically different, clubs: the Cotton Club and, a couple blocks to the west, the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom. The two clubs came to define the two Harlems—Harlem Light and Harlem Dark—as clearly as the blue and gray uniforms of the Civil War. The Cotton Club symbolized how white America perceived African-Americans: as happy, dancing children, obsessed with sensuality and therefore incapable of sophisticated thoughts or actions. The Renaissance Casino and Ballroom symbolized the ideals of self-reliance and community values that the Harlem Renaissance was preaching.

  The Cotton Club was part of a bizarre tradition in Harlem that included other fancy clubs such as Connie’s Inn and Small’s Paradise. These clubs, though operating in the heart of black Harlem, catered exclusively to white customers. Yet, in their shows and decor they still promoted an idealized but wholly inaccurate black lifestyle similar to those in minstrel shows. Menacing bouncers were stationed at the doors to make sure no black faces were admitted to the establishments, located on the same blocks where these black men and women lived. Eleven such segregated clubs were listed in Variety, but the most famous and popular of the group was the Cotton Club, the largest, fanciest, highest-priced, which featured the most extravagant shows.

  Originally, the club was owned by a black icon who, in the eyes of other African-Americans, stood for defiance of white racism. Former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson—an amateur cellist and fiddler and frequenter of Harlem’s raucous nightlife—bought the struggling Douglas Casino in 1920, changing the name to the Club Deluxe. But Johnson was unable to make the club any more successful than the predecessor. By 1923, Johnson sold it to mobster Owney Madden, who was in prison at the time for manslaughter. Madden, who also owned the popular Stork Club and Silver Slipper, which were frequented by the rich and famous from around the world, wanted the Cotton Club to be equally renowned, so he poured a significant amount of money into renovation. For its decor, he chose to re-create, in the middle of Harlem, the plantation South and its attitude, from which so many Harlemites had fled. From their elegantly appointed tables, white patrons could view the three nightly stage shows. The shows were written exclusively for the club and they were so extravagant that they rivaled even Broadway shows. In fact, some of the shows did move on to Broadway. The revues featured some of the most famous black performers of the day, including Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Edith Wilson, and Earl “Snakehips” Tucker. Duke Ellington and his orchestra were the house band from 1927 to 1931, and again in 1933. Between 1931 and 1933, Cab Calloway took over as bandleader. Most important, the club served as the principal East Coast outlet for “Madden’s No. 1” beer.

  Other
Harlem clubs trying to compete with the Cotton Club were sometimes met with violence. The Plantation Club tried to imitate the Cotton Club’s style and venue by hiring Cab Calloway and his orchestra away from the Cotton Club. Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” routine was famous and a big attraction. Cotton Club owner Madden was not pleased, so he sent a few of his men over to the Plantation Club to break up the place. They destroyed tables and chairs, shattered glasses, and dragged the bar out to the curb. Calloway returned to the Cotton Club.

  Despite the Cotton Club’s gangster origins—in fact, because of it—this became, in Lady Mountbatten’s words, “The Aristocrat of Harlem” for the white elite of New York. The wealthy patrons, bedecked in their finest jewelry, hoped to be thrilled with a glimpse of Al Capone or Owen Madden. Mob bouncers met patrons at the door, enforcing the strict color code of whites only. Inside, the waiters, dancers, musicians, and stage performers were black, but were not permitted to socialize with the customers. The young girls of the chorus line had to be under twenty-one, over five feet six inches tall, and of light complexion. This discriminatory policy gained even more respectability because of the white celebrities who frequented the Cotton Club, including Mayor Jimmy Walker and singer Jimmy Durante. In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes comments on the growing resentment within the black community: “Nor did ordinary Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in a zoo.”

  Rather than be outraged, the white public embraced the Cotton Club and its Uncle Remus vision of African-Americans. In 1927, CBS began broadcasting live shows from the Cotton Club, sometimes five or six a week. This created an unexpected opportunity: while the cartoonish portrayal of black culture made the Cotton Club popular enough to have a radio show, the show also provided a platform for the innovative jazz music of Duke Ellington, which led many white listeners to embrace authentic black culture and led to the dispelling of the silly stereotypes from the Cotton Club.