On the Shoulders of Giants Read online

  The Cotton Club and other segregated nightclubs didn’t just slap local residents in the face, but promoted and gave respectability to a vision of African-Americans that the Harlem Renaissance was desperately combating. They not only confirmed humiliating stereotypes, but led significant numbers of blacks to embrace those same self-deprecating ideals. The conventional wisdom was that white culture and white perceptions of beauty, including lighter skin and straight hair, were somehow superior. These were the physical requirements for many of the performers at the segregated clubs. Consequently, many Harlemites chose to emulate, rather than reject, the twisted perceptions embodied by the Cotton Club.

  This obsession with copying white ideals of beauty was most evident in the practices of lightening skin color and hair straightening, or conking. Even the most politically conscious magazines advertised creams that promised to lighten dark skin (products that are still widely advertised today). Ironically, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most important figures was socialite and heiress A’Leila Walker, who inherited her money from her mother, Madame C. J. Walker, the child of ex-slave sharecroppers, who built a hair-straightening empire that had made her over $2 million by her death in 1919. A’Leila Walker spent much of her hair-conking inheritance promoting African-American artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. In Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (part of which is set during the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance), the character Shug comments on blacks’ self-perception as symbolized by conking hair: “Somewhere in the bible it say Jesus’ hair was like lamb’s wool, I say. Well, say Shug, if he came to any of these churches we talking bout he’d have to have it conked before anybody paid him any attention. The last thing niggers want to think about they God is that his hair kinky.”

  The intellects of the Harlem Renaissance realized that before whites would see blacks as equals, first blacks had to see themselves that way—and not try to pretend to be white or adopt white ideals of beauty. And the Cotton Club, which promoted the inferiority of black identity, was a major obstacle that had to be overcome.

  The other Harlem—the one that was inhabited by the black residents—was represented by nightclubs like the Lenox Club, the Plantation Inn, the Savoy Ballroom, and the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom. These establishments served the black community and were the places that Harlemites frequented for entertainment or to hold social, political, or family events. Many major local events were held at the Savoy, which boasted not only a large mixed-race clientele, but was also famous as the home of the trendy dance the Lindy Hop.

  The club that in many ways most represented the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance was over on 150 West 138th Street—a two-story redbrick building called the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom. This was the place that the Cotton Club building had first been erected to compete against. And just as the name implies, this establishment embodied the heart and soul of what the Harlem Renaissance was all about. While the corrupt, mob-operated Cotton Club flaunted its patronizing attitude toward African-Americans, the black-owned-and-operated Renaissance Casino celebrated African-American achievements. This is where many of Harlem’s more dignified events took place, including the annual awards dinners held by the NAACP’s periodical, the Crisis, the magazine that had done the most to define and develop the ideals of the New Negro. Meetings of black unions and clubs were common, including the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Business and Professional Men’s Forum. Patrons danced to the jazz licks of the house band fronted by Vernon Andrade, as well as other renowned musicians and entertainers such as the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, Louis Armstrong, Elmer Snowden’s band, Rex Stewart, Dickie Wells, Cecil Scott, Roy Eldridge, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. While the Cotton Club rejected the black community, the Renaissance clientele reflected the black community. But most important, it celebrated the black community, from its workers to its artists to its writers.

  And the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom had one other thing that the Cotton Club didn’t have: an all-black championship basketball team, the Rens (see the chapter “ ‘Fairness Creeps out of the Soul’: Basketball Comes to Harlem”). Between band sets, the dance floor would be cleared and the Rens would play basketball to the enthusiastic cheers of the patrons. When the game was over, the hoops would be stored away and the dancing would continue, sometimes with team members joining the customers on the dance floor. More important, the team barnstormed throughout the Midwest, South, and Northeast. Through the team’s athleticism and courage in the face of constant racism, they helped spread the gospel of the Harlem Renaissance without even knowing it.

  Strivers’ Row and Sugar Hill:

  The Street of the Elite

  Officially named the St. Nicholas Historic District, the stretch between Seventh and Eighth avenues on 138th and 139th streets was commonly known as Strivers’ Row. The nickname was bestowed on the area to describe its residents—African-American doctors, dentists, and bandleaders who were “striving” for a better lifestyle. These individuals were successful despite the economic and social hardships faced by African-Americans at the time. Strivers’ Row specifically refers to the three rows of town houses constructed between 1891 and 1893 and developed by the first African-American architect, David H. King, who also built Madison Square Garden and the base of the Statue of Liberty. Other houses in this district were designed by some of America’s most prominent architects, including the celebrated Stanford White, who planned the neo–Italian Renaissance houses on the north side of West 139th Street. Each building has a rear courtyard and gated alleyway where the owner’s horses could go directly to the stables.

  Despite the classy design and pedigree of the architects, the development company was at first unable to sell the houses. Black influx into Harlem and white flight left them empty for years. Finally, out of desperation, the houses were sold to blacks, but only ambitious professionals—“strivers”—were able to afford them. Musicians Eubie Blake, Fletcher Henderson, comedian Stepin Fetchit, preacher/congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and W. C. Handy, the “father of the blues,” all lived on Strivers’ Row. Wallace Thurman barely conceals his contempt for the place in his 1928 description: “Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, is 139th Street, known among Harlemites as ‘strivers’ row.’ It is the most aristocratic street in Harlem. Stanford White designed the houses for a wealthy white clientele. Moneyed Negroes now own and inhabit them. When one lives on ‘strivers’ row’ one has supposedly arrived. Harry Rills resides there, as do a number of the leading Babbitts and professional folk of Harlem.” Today, the buildings are all designated landmarks.

  Like Strivers’ Row, Sugar Hill became the place to live for those who had arrived at the good life. Perched on a bluff above Harlem Plains, Sugar Hill is not a hill and never had anything to do with sugar. The “sugar” nickname is thought to imply that the residents here were living the “sweet life.” Jazz musician Duke Ellington, who was on the road and missing his home in Sugar Hill—“where life is sweet”—made the place famous when he cowrote, with fellow Sugar Hill resident Billy Strayhorn, “Take the ‘A’ Train (Up to Sugar Hill in Harlem),” which became Ellington’s theme song. This upscale neighborhood was part of Hamilton Heights, extending from Edgecombe Avenue to Amsterdam Avenue, and from 145th Street to 155th Street. Harlem historian Levering Lewis (When Harlem Was in Vogue) described Sugar Hill as “a citadel of stately apartment buildings and liveried doormen on a rock, [that] soared above the Polo Grounds and the rest of Harlem like a city of the Incas.” From those exalted heights gazed the elite of the black community, including Harlem Renaissance intellect W. E. B. Du Bois, NAACP leaders Walter White and Roy Wilkins, and civil rights leader the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.; writers Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston; singer/actor Paul Robeson; artists Aaron Douglas and Hale Woodruff; jazz musicians Cab Calloway, Luckey Roberts, and Jimmie Lunceford; and other notables such as socialite A’Leila Walker and special counsel to the NAACP Thurgood Marshall
, the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court justice. Ebony magazine described the residents of Sugar Hill as Harlem’s most prominent men and women in law, sports, civil liberties, music, medicine, painting, business, and literature.

  135th Street:

  The Boulevard of Brains

  If Seventh Avenue was the beautiful face of Harlem, and Lenox Avenue was its loins, then 135th Street was its brains. This is where the New Negro of the Harlem Renaissance would learn how to come into being. Here on 135th Street many of the literary elite lived, wrote, and performed. The Harlem YMCA provided not only a place to live for Langston Hughes and many other writers (before they became successful enough to move to Sugar Hill), but it also made rooms available for literary groups to share their latest creations. Harlemites would gather at the YMCA to listen to the latest works of Langston Hughes or Countee Cullen.

  One of the most formative places in encouraging these artist/warriors was the 135th Street Library, which was the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. In 1926, Arthur Schomburg, a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, donated his vast collection of ten thousand books, manuscripts, and artworks to the library. This magnanimous gesture resulted in the renaming of the library as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Here, many of Harlem’s literary elite studied the past—and forged their future. Nearly every writer to come out of the Harlem Renaissance did research at this library. (And it was here, thirty-eight years after its founding, a seventeen-year-old Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would wander into the building and discover the wonders of the Harlem Renaissance. See the chapter “ ‘Mad Medley’: How Harlem Influenced My Life.”)

  The Schomburg Center was more than a passive repository of the past, it was an active participant in making history. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the library promoted various cultural activities, including commissioning African-American art for its walls. One of its most renowned commissions was Aaron Douglas’s murals called Aspects of Negro Life. While 135th Street nurtured the Harlem Renaissance’s most famous communicators, it also housed its most popular means of communication among the community. Here, among the barbershops and beauty salons immortalized by Renaissance photographers James Van Der Zee and Morgan and Marvin Smith, word of literary events, political rallies, and social gatherings were passed along.

  125th Street:

  Basking in the Light of the Apollo

  Just a few blocks away from the literary neighborhood was Harlem’s commercial hub: 125th Street. Here, among the many shops and department stores, is where much of Harlem shopped. And when they were done shopping, there was entertainment of all kinds: from the classical operas at the Harlem Opera House, to the jazz and blues at the Apollo Theater.

  The 1,750-seat Apollo, “America’s Finest Colored Theatre,” was Harlem’s most prestigious theater, featuring performers such as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday. A 1937 article from the New York World-Telegram described the Apollo:

  The theatre stands behind a gaudy neon sign between a haberdashery and a leather goods store…. You can buy your ticket at a sidewalk booth (from fifteen cents mornings to a fifty cent top Wednesday and Saturday nights) and enter through a narrow lobby lined with bathroom tiles, glistening mirrors and photographs of such Harlem idols as Ethel Waters and Louis Armstrong…. On the rear wall hang three large oil paintings, each featuring several square feet of female flesh…. The wallpaper has a recurring motif of a nude young woman.

  This is where Harlemites of all walks of life would go to see the latest African-American entertainers. And every performer knew that his or her career depended on how well he or she was received at the Apollo. Beyond providing a venue for many of the Harlem Renaissance’s most famous performers who would go on to be embraced by white audiences, the Apollo gave Harlemites a sense of pride in their own culture. The theater produced over thirty shows a week and featured an amateur night that launched many careers, including that of Pearl Bailey in 1934.

  Surviving in Harlem:

  Heaven On a Budget

  While the best and brightest of the Harlem Renaissance struggled to create a new image of African-Americans, most of the residents of Harlem didn’t know anything about it and couldn’t have cared less if they did. As Langston Hughes observed, “The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.” Given some time, they might have appreciated the intentions of the Harlem Renaissance: to use the talents of the black artists, musicians, and writers to force white America to see blacks as intellectual, athletic, and moral equals to the whites. If only they weren’t preoccupied with earning their daily bread.

  Everyone wanted a piece of paradise. But the constant influx of black immigrants from the South and West Indies caused such overcrowding that residents were forced to face a whole new set of challenges. The density rate for whites in New York City was 222 per acre, while for blacks it was an astounding 336 per acre. Aside from the enormous economic toll, the housing congestion had additional fallout. More people crammed into smaller space resulted in quicker deterioration of the properties, making them less attractive and more dangerous. In addition, the high density of people meant higher rates of communicable diseases and higher mortality rates. Between 1923 and 1927, the death rate from pneumonia for whites in New York City was 124 per 100,000; for blacks in Harlem it was nearly double that, 244 per 100,000. The death rate from tuberculosis for white New Yorkers was 76 per 100,000; for black Harlemites it was 183 per 100,000. Hundreds of Harlem residents died each year for no other reason than color. For some, it was hard to tell the difference between the oppressive old South they had run away from and their new home in the North. The unnecessary death of a loved one was just as heartbreaking, whether at the hands of an angry Southern white mob—or the turned backs of a neglectful Northern white citizenry.

  It would be poetic to report that such adversity resulted in the pulling together of Harlem’s African-Americans into a one-for-all-and-all-for-one community. But that, too, would be Disney stereotyping. Human interactions are much grittier and more complicated. In fact, adversity sometimes turned Harlemites against each other. Ironically, much of this internal conflict was based on the color of skin and where you were from. Racism and regionalism of blacks against blacks threatened to destroy the community from within. Jervis Anderson describes the tension in his book This Was Harlem, 1900–1950: “Northern-born blacks looked down on the speech and manners of those who had recently arrived from the rural South; an upper class, consisting mainly of light-skinned professionals, fought to be recognized as Harlem’s most representative social grouping; West Indians and black Americans often glared xenophobically at one another across borders of accent and cultural style.”

  The discrimination of American blacks against West Indians was especially significant since they provided so much of the talent and momentum for the Harlem Renaissance. Seventeen percent of blacks in New York City were foreign-born, yet one-third of the city’s black professionals, physicians, dentists, and lawyers were foreign-born. Most of them West Indians. The West Indians who came to Harlem were in general more educated and highly trained than other immigrants. Many had left their homelands less because of racism than because of a static economy. Though they were certainly aware of the blatant racism in the United States, they came from a society in which they were the majority, so the racism was less unrelenting. In their society, people were white, black, or mulatto, so the many mulattoes who came were not prepared to suddenly be referred to and treated as black. In their countries, successful blacks held a higher social status than poor whites. The West Indians had not been raised, as had many American blacks, with an attitude of submission and nonresistance. The result was the rise of many West Indians to prominence in the black community during the Harlem Renaissance, including activist Marcus Garvey, Rens founder and Renaissance Casino and Ballroom manager Bob Douglas, and prominent author Claude McKay.

  For most
of the black residents of Harlem, daily life could be summed up in one frustrating word: rent. Harlemites were paying significantly more money for housing than whites in similar neighborhoods in Manhattan. By 1938, the average apartment rent in Harlem was $30 per month, while a comparable apartment elsewhere in Manhattan went for only $18. Not only were blacks earning less money, they had to pay higher rents. Harlem renters were paying 40 percent of their income on rent alone. And if the rent wasn’t paid by Sunday night, on Monday morning the landlord would have all their furniture on the street and be renting out the rooms to the next eager person. Desperate to keep their homes, residents began throwing paid-admission parties to raise the rent money.

  Rent parties became a common fixture in Harlem—and a major source of community entertainment. Usually thrown on Saturday and Thursday nights, when domestics had the night off, these events were often much more elaborate than just inviting a few close friends over. Flyers were printed and distributed through pool halls, Laundromats, and even handed out to people on the street. Rooms were cleared of furniture, except for chairs that had been borrowed from the local undertaker. Strangers and friends alike paid anywhere from ten to fifty cents and were, for that amount, treated to a full night of live music and even livelier companions. And most important: the rent got paid. Wallace Thurman describes the liveliness—as well as the necessity—of the typical rent party: