Negro Life in New York's Harlem

Negro Life in New York's Harlem

Wallace Thurman's "Negro Life in New York's Harlem" is a survey of Harlem as a thriving black city, set within greater New York and shaped by the city's rhythms. It describes Negro Harlem as a large, brick-and-stone community on a choice site in northwestern Manhattan, and it walks through its main thoroughfares. Fifth Avenue is the edge of the slum district, Lenox Avenue is Harlem's Bowery, and Eighth Avenue is dark and commercial. Edgecombe, Brandhurst and St. Nicholas Avenues are better residential streets. Seventh Avenue, "Black Broadway," is the most representative street, crowded each evening with theatergoers, churchgoers, street speakers and promenaders. On 139th Street, "strivers' row," moneyed Negroes live in houses once designed for wealthy whites. Thurman gives a population of about 200,000 and describes severe overcrowding, high rents, profiteering landlords and cots in every room. He traces the community's growth from earlier settlements in Greenwich Village and west Fifty-third Street. Around 1900 Negroes began moving to Harlem, white residents fled in panic, and property values fell. The wartime labor shortage then brought a great migration of southern Negroes and over thirty thousand West Indians. Diverse employment has let Harlem Negroes accumulate real estate worth more than sixty million dollars. He maps the social structure. Harlem holds Africans, West Indians, Spanish-speaking Negroes and many others. The American Negro often disdains the British West Indian, who has learned to fight back. Thurman describes the clubs and lodges, and Marcus Garvey and his Black Star Line and parades. He also describes the small, light-skinned, snobbish "dicty" upper class, the striving bourgeoisie, a few artistic spirits and the great proletarian mass that gives Harlem its color. The essay then turns to amusements. Night clubs such as Small's Paradise, Bamville, Connie's Inn and the Cotton Club are crowded with white downtowners, while the Sugar Cane Club serves a rougher Negro clientele. Hidden speak-easies like the Glory Hole offer spontaneous pleasure. The Bamboo Inn serves "high Harlem." The Savoy, the Renaissance Casino and the Manhattan Casino are the dance halls, and Thurman notes that Negroes own none of them. He contrasts Harlem with Chicago and other cities, observing that Harlem has no Negro-controlled banks or major enterprises. He then covers the movie houses, from the Renaissance to the foul Franklin and Gem, and the Lafayette and Lincoln theaters, with their imitative revues and raucous midnight shows. Thurman gives special attention to three institutions. House rent parties are held to pay the landlord, with admission fees, cards passed out on the street, pig feet and gin. Numbers is an illegal lottery based on stock exchange clearing house figures, played by almost everyone, with runners and bankers collecting bets, and he ends the section by saying he will play fifty cents himself. "Hot men" sell supposedly stolen goods, mostly bankrupt stock, so that low-paid workers can dress well on Seventh Avenue. He then surveys religion: large Baptist and Methodist churches, wealthy St. Phillips Episcopal, the new St. Marks, and outlaw sects including Holy Rollers, Black Jews, Mohammedans and Spiritualists. He describes the five Negro weeklies, including The New York Age, The Negro World and The Amsterdam News. He notes the surplus of women, the "sweetbacks" they support, and the Negro intelligentsia and aspiring writers and artists of the so-called renaissance. Thurman concludes that Harlem is a "mad medley" and a "dream city pregnant with wide-awake realities," still expanding and offering Negroes a sense of security. He adds that there is no typical Harlem Negro, only a motley, varied community of every shade, origin and class.

By Wallace Thurman · First published 1928 · Genre: Sociological nonfiction, Cultural criticism, Literary journalism · 10 chapters · 13,147 words

First lines

Harlem has been called the Mecca of the New Negro, the center of black America's cultural renaissance, Nigger Heaven, Pickaninny Paradise, Capitol of Black America, and various other things. It has been surveyed and interpreted, explored and exploited. It has had its day in literature, in the drama, even in the tabloid press. It is considered the most popular and interesting section of contemporary New York. Its fame is international; its personality individual and inimitable. There is no Negro settlement anywhere comparable to Harlem, just as there is no other metropolis comparable to New York. As the great south side black belt of Chicago spreads and smells with the same industrial clumsiness and stockyardish vigor of Chicago, so does the black belt of New York teem and rhyme with the cosmopolitan cross currents of the world's greatest city. Harlem is Harlem because it is part and parcel of greater New York. Its rhythms are the lackadaisical rhythms of a transplanted minority group caught up and rendered half mad by the more speedy rhythms of the subway, Fifth Avenue and the Great White Way.

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Harlem · New York City · 1920s · Great Migration · New Negro · Harlem Renaissance · Black urban life · Overcrowded tenements · Housing and real estate · Marcus Garvey · West Indian immigrants · Colorism

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