In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm

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      CHAPTER 2

      THE GREAT MECCA

      Drunk with the memory of the ghetto

      Drunk with the lure of the looting

      And the memory of the uniforms shoving with their sticks

      Asking, “Are you looking for trouble?”

      —Phil Ochs, “In the Heat of the Summer”

       1873–1963

      In the summer of 1933, Bayard Rustin made his first visit to Harlem. A tall and handsome young man with a restless mind, athletic build, and musical talent, he was born in Pennsylvania in 1912, the son of unmarried parents he never really knew. He was raised mostly by his grandmother, who was educated in integrated Quaker schools and influenced by Quaker ideas. But she could not shelter him from the realities of the world. One of Rustin’s earliest brushes with discrimination came when, as a member of the West Chester High School football team, he was denied service in a restaurant in the nearby town of Media and decided to stage his own sit-in, three decades before the famous Nashville protests of 1960. “I sat there quite a long time,” he noted later, “and was eventually thrown out bodily. From that point on, I had the conviction that I would not accept segregation.”¹

      After his first year at Wilberforce University in western Ohio, Rustin came to New York to see his aunt, a teacher who lived in Harlem. By then the Great Depression was in full force—only months earlier newly elected Franklin Roosevelt had taken the oath of office and assured the nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But pure excitement was the twenty-one-year-old Rustin’s initial reaction when he arrived in Harlem. “A totally thrilling experience,” he recalled. “I’ll never forget my first walk on 125th Street.… I had such a feeling of exhilaration.”²

      New arrivals often had a similar response because 125th Street was the main artery of Central Harlem, the historic and symbolic heart of black America. Stretching roughly from 110th Street (the northern border of Central Park) to 145th Street, Fifth Avenue to Morningside Park and St. Nicholas Park, the neighborhood was overwhelmingly African American. By contrast, East Harlem and Spanish Harlem were more mixed, with large numbers of Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, and Puerto Ricans.

      “Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious, and the talented of the whole Negro world,” James Weldon Johnson, the noted author, poet, lawyer, diplomat, and first black executive secretary of the NAACP, wrote in the 1920s. “It is a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.” But the energy of Harlem could not disguise the fact that it was also a ghetto, with all of the underlying social and economic problems that typically added fuel to the fires of outrage. Periodically, the community exploded, most notably in 1935 during the Great Depression and in 1943 during World War II, even as the same conditions persisted into the 1950s and 1960s. To appreciate what happened in 1964 it is important to understand the history of Harlem.³

      After the Civil War, New York City underwent an urban revolution. New neighborhoods were needed as the population surpassed a million, and in 1873 Harlem was annexed. By 1881 the elevated railroad had reached 129th Street and a building boom soon followed, with row upon row of elegant brownstones and exclusive apartments constructed on broad and leafy streets in the next two decades. It was, predicted a magazine in 1893, inevitable that “the center of fashion, wealth, culture and intelligence must, in the near future, be found in the ancient and honorable village of Harlem.”⁴

      The real estate speculators assumed that if they built it, wealthy whites would come to Harlem in search of fresh air and living space as well as an escape from the noise and congestion of the city. But not if they had to share the area with blacks, who were not welcome. So commercial banks were pressured not to offer mortgages to African Americans. Property owners were forced to sign restrictive covenants stating that they would rent or sell only to Caucasians. And neighborhood associations were formed to defend the color barrier. “We are approaching a crisis,” declared the founder of the Harlem Property Owners Improvement Corporation in 1913. “It is the question of whether the white man will rule Harlem or the Negro.”⁵

      But by then it was too late. A wave of speculation in Harlem had swamped the housing market, causing it to collapse in 1905 amid a sea of unsold and unrented buildings. Meanwhile, black migrants from the South and immigrants from the Caribbean were flooding into other parts of the city, causing apartment shortages and rising rents. Tensions also festered between longtime residents and new arrivals, both the native- and foreign-born, which caused lasting divisions within the black community. At the same time, urban renewal and commercial expansion, such as the construction of the original and ornate Pennsylvania Station, were destroying affordable housing and dislocating black residents in Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side and in Midtown Manhattan.

      Into the breach stepped entrepreneurs such as Philip Payton, founder of the Afro-Am Realty Company, which began to lease Harlem properties from white owners and then rent them to black tenants. Payton was a graduate of Livingston College in North Carolina who had moved to New York in 1899 to make his fortune. After working as a handyman, a barber (his father’s trade), and a janitor in a real estate office, he saw his chance and seized it. Another opportunist was Solomon Riley, a barrel-chested Barbados native with a Caucasian wife who followed the same strategy as Payton. “I decided to turn the sword’s edge the other way” was how he put it.⁶

      The Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) line along Lenox Avenue, completed in 1904, opened the floodgates to black families eager to enjoy the good life and spacious apartments in Harlem. Their ranks grew as the economic stimulus of World War I created job opportunities in northern factories and reinforced the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South. In the decade after 1918, almost a hundred thousand blacks moved to Central Harlem, which by 1930 was home to almost two hundred thousand African Americans, more than 65 percent of New York’s black population and 12 percent of the city population.⁷

      By the Jazz Age Central Harlem had become the place where African Americans could enjoy the “fundamental rights of American citizenship” according to Johnson, whose mother hailed from the Bahamas. “In return, the Negro loves New York and is proud of it, and contributes in his way to its greatness.” During the 1920s and 1930s, greatness was everywhere as the Harlem Renaissance attracted the most gifted and talented blacks from across the United States and the West Indies.⁸

      Entertainers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Florence Mills, Bert Williams, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Fats Waller graced the stages of the Apollo Theater, the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise, and the Savoy Ballroom. Writers and poets like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston dazzled the literary world. And scholars like E. Franklin Frazier, a Howard University sociologist, and Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar and author of The New Negro, produced important studies of black society.⁹

      At the same time, institutions both sacred (such as the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which soon had the largest Protestant congregation in the country) and secular (such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) enriched life in Harlem. СКАЧАТЬ