Still Life in Harlem (10 page)

Harlem was the Promised Land, where black men and women came to escape, came to reach beyond the grasp they would have been able to reach for in the places they came from, came at the very least to dream the dreams that might have gone unimagined. They came to make real the impossible. For those coming up from the Deep South, Harlem was the last stop on the long journey now called the Great Migration, when the steady stream of blacks that had been flowing out of the South since the end of the Civil War became like a torrent.

Out of the South they fled, as far away as possible from the lynchman's noose and the Jim Crow laws designed to keep a black man from being treated like a man, far away from the culture that saw nothing wrong with black men being lynched as if for sport, doused with gasoline and set on fire, driven from their homes and shot like hogs. In the South, it seemed, no act of terror was indefensible in the noble effort to keep blacks in their ordained and proper place of complete misery: ignorant and lowly, without hope or opportunity. Racism suddenly had taken a turn for the worse, if such a thing were possible, and white supremacy descended to new depths of viciousness, virulence, and angry violence. The first wave of the Great Migration was more like the flight out of Egypt.

“Every time a lynching takes place in a community down South,” said T. Arnold Hill, head of the Chicago Urban League, “you can depend on it that colored people will arrive in Chicago within two weeks.”

He could as easily have been referring to New York City, or to Detroit, or to any other city in the North. Not that the Mason-Dixon line was any kind of barrier to intense racial hatreds. Up North as well as down South, lynchings still took place. Up North as well as down South, there was mob violence against blacks. Up North as well as down South, the demons discrimination and color prejudice were woven so tightly into the fabric of American life and American thinking that there had never yet been a time—perhaps still has not yet been a time—in American history when blacks could feel the full weight of their right to liberty, to life, and to the pursuit of happiness. They had never been then, perhaps have never been yet, fully accepted, North or South, as American citizens—nor even, it could be said, as human beings.

To say that life was unfair for Blackamericans would be to state the ridiculously obvious.

In the middle of the nineteenth century Irish and German immigrants were learning to flex political muscle as a means toward their advancement. Most native-born blacks were not even allowed to vote—not in the South, not in the North.

In New York City, where the foundations for Harlem as a black community were being laid, even after blacks had been given the right to vote they still had to meet residency requirements stricter than the requirements for whites. Long after property ownership requirements had been removed for all other New Yorkers, blacks still had to meet them. Out of a population of ten thousand blacks in 1865, only forty-four were eligible to vote.

Blacks in New York City were denied equal access to almost all public facilities, including public education. In white Christian churches they were forced to sit in designated sections. All over Manhattan, right until the end of the Civil War, there were the signs: For Colored People Only.

Harlem, of course, had to happen. Whites had made it clear that they cared little about the concerns of blacks. Even after the great New York City race riot of 1900, whites still refused to pay serious attention to black demands for justice and equality. In fact, when the rioting had ended, it was reported that many whites in New York admitted they would have been happier if the blacks who had been merely injured had instead been killed. Newspapers reported that the angry mobs of whites attacking blacks could easily have been broken up but that the police did nothing to offer protection. The police actually abetted the rioters, taking defenseless men and women and throwing them to the angry crowds. In many cases the police beat blacks more savagely than the rioters themselves.

The riot was sparked when Arthur Harris saw his wife in the grasp of a plainclothes police officer and ran to her defense. The policeman clubbed him, knocked him down, and shouted, “Get up, you black son of a bitch.” Trying to protect himself, he said, and not knowing the man was a police officer, Harris fought back and stabbed him. The policeman died two days later. The following day the dead cop's neighborhood erupted in retaliation.

Blacks were chased, attacked, dragged from buses and streetcars, and beaten. Any black person who happened to be on the street that day and night was assaulted.

William Elliott was arrested for carrying a pistol. He was taken apparently unharmed to the Thirty-seventh Street police station. By the time he left, his brains had been beaten out of his head.

Area hospitals were full of black people whose heads had been bashed in. The local police courts were jammed with black people who had been arrested. When an outraged magistrate demanded that some of the white rioters be brought before him as well, one lone teenager was hauled in. He was accused of trying to trip a police officer.

Yet in the aftermath of these riots, the
New York Times
went so far as to make the curious claim that there were no signs that blacks were distrusted or disliked, stating, in fact, the contrary:
“His crude melodies and childlike antics are more than tolerated.…”

Henry Turner, a bishop in Georgia, said plainly,
“Hell would be an improvement upon the United States when the Negro is involved.”

“No man hates this Nation more than I do,” he said.

Harlem had to happen, a place where blacks could be apart and away from this kind of injustice. They needed a place of their own, a place where they could feel they belonged, a place where they could be part of something, a place where impossible dreams could anyway be dreamed.

Blacks by and large had missed out on land allotted under the Homestead Act. This, then, would have to be their collective plot. Harlem as no other place would be theirs.

Blackamerica needed Harlem. Oddly enough, Harlem needed Blackamerica. The time was right for it.

If it had been a question only of fleeing the reign of terror, degradation, and racial violence that rampaged in the South, black men and women would have fled long before they did. They would have escaped as soon after the destruction of slavery as they had been able. If it had been a question of economics only and the search for jobs, the Great Migration would have been greatest during the industrial boom of the 1870s.

But rather, some unseen hand was at work here, some strange force far subtler and more insidious even than merely time and circumstance, something far more akin to the influence of stars and planets, perhaps, than to that which can be plotted on social and economic flow charts.

Out of the South they came, these black men and women, out of the South and ready for something new, a new generation ready to
be
something new.

By then of course blacks had been living in Manhattan for close to three hundred years, since 1626 when it was still a Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam and eleven Africans were imported to work as indentured servants. After 1664 other blacks began to arrive. The Dutch had given way by then to the English. New Amsterdam had become New York. The indentured servants had become slaves.

Some of the blacks lived even then in the village called Harlem, but by the time slavery was abolished in New York in 1827, most blacks lived on the south end of the island. By the time of the 1830 census there were 13,976 blacks living in New York. Most of them had been born there.

By the end of the century, however, more than half the black population had been born elsewhere.

Certainly they came from other parts of the United States, from the islands in the Caribbean, from all around the black universe, but by and large the new arrivals to New York City came from the Deep South, bringing with them their music, their food, their language and religion, influencing and perhaps even laying the foundation for an entire culture.

Out of the South they came: the businessmen, the educated, the politicians, and the skilled workers; but came too the unskilled workers, the cooks and the maids, the waiters, the coachmen, the physical laborers; came too even those who had fewer skills than these, many of them vagrants, vagabonds, and criminals, some out for a taste of city life, some who came only to see and then never went back, some running away from home. Some wanted nothing more than a change. All of them were part of the new generation of blacks with whom the elements of nature and time had conspired. For these who came were not merely answering the call to the big city. These who came were responding to circumstances created in part by the end of slavery. These who came were not the former slaves themselves but the sons of slaves, the daughters of slaves, the grandchildren of slaves. They were a new kind of Blackamerican evolving out of the old. They had not experienced in the same way as their parents and grandparents so complete and abject a denial of their humanity. They wanted to expand and grow. They thought they owned a piece of the future.

For the most part the older generation continued even in freedom the lives they had known in slavery days. As sharecroppers and tenant farmers now, they worked the same land they had once worked as slaves. They could conceive of little else.

The new generation, however, wanted more. Surely they came to escape the South's restrictions on what they could and could not do, who they could and could not be, and surely they were fleeing the violence of the South and a culture that reserved for them only the chaff and the dregs, at best. Just as surely they came to earn the higher wages offered in the mechanized North. But what their parents and grandparents could hardly fathom, what the whites who needed their labors on farms throughout the South refused to recognize, was what really drew the new generation, the New Negro, as he called himself, to places like New York City, and specifically to this place called Harlem. It was to create a new identity.

The world around them was in the midst of enormous social evolution. In the North institutionalized racism was under siege. Laws were being passed attempting to guarantee equal rights for blacks. Since 1873 they could vote in New York State without impediment. Because of new legislation they could now, at least by law, share buses and trains with whites, go to the same theaters, eat in the same restaurants, be buried in the same public cemeteries.

In the 1880s a black man served on a New York City jury. Separate education ended when the last three black schools were brought into the same system as other public schools. Ten years later Susan Frazier became the first black teacher in a white public school.

It wasn't utopia; there was still discrimination, still a lot of racial hatred; but the world was in transition. Now there was possibility.

Now too came the explosion, and the numbers more than doubled. In the final decade of the nineteenth century over a hundred thousand blacks fled the South, twenty-five thousand to New York City alone. Between 1890 and 1910 two hundred thousand additional blacks had migrated to cities in the North and the West.

In
Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto,
Gilbert Osofsky writes, “The most important factor underlying the establishment of Harlem as a Negro community was the substantial increase of Negro population in New York City in the years 1890–1914.”

The black population of New York City had tripled.

It was all boiling together now. The moon and the stars and all the planets were on the move. The industrialization of the late nineteenth century was gathering steam and needed manpower. The Great Migration was on full blast. Harlem as
Harlem
was becoming inevitable.

Came then the world war, and with it more black immigrants. The war machine, like the industrial machine, needed manpower. Blacks fled the farm and aimed for the city to power the machinery that European immigration had previously helped to fuel, but which now because of the war had fallen off. When the war ended, blacks were still coming, from the South certainly, but from the Caribbean as well, assisted by the immigration laws of the 1920s, which had severely curtailed the influx of Europeans but virtually ignored islanders from the West Indies.

And so they came. Oh! how they came, these blacks from the South and from the islands, came to make Harlem, came seeking the future, but came as well to escape, for with the increasing numbers of blacks came the typical knee-jerk reaction of whites sensing that the invader has simply gone too far, either in number or in overstepping the bounds of freedoms, rights and equalities that black people ought to be allowed: racial discord, separation and further alienation.

White churches that had once received blacks, as long as they were small in number and sat in separate pews, now told them they were not welcome at all, now told them to get churches of their own.

The same was happening in white hotels, restaurants, and theaters. Blacks were no longer able to get service. A separate YMCA was built to keep black people out of the facilities that white folks used.

In a climate of rampant anxiety at the increasing black population, efforts were advanced to roll back measures that had been intended to ease racial tensions and prejudice. There was even a proposal to void all marriages that had taken place between
“a person of the white or Caucasian race and a person of the negro or black race.”

Blacks were kept out of the unions and out of all but the most menial and worst-paying jobs: janitors and street sweepers, porters, elevator operators, waiters, and shoe shiners. Blacks were kept on the fringe, largely unemployed, certainly underemployed, not worthy of great concern.

Black people needed refuge from a world that, according to the
New York Freeman,
saw them “more as a problem than as a factor in the general weal, with the same desires, passions, hopes, ambitions as other human creatures.”