On the Shoulders of Giants

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  There may be only piano music, there may be a piano and a drum, or a three or four-piece ensemble. Red lights, dim and suggestive, are in order. The parlor and the dining room are cleared for the dance, and one bedroom is utilized for hats and coats. In the kitchen will be found boiled pigs’ feet, ham hock and cabbage, hopping John (a combination of peas and rice), and other proletarian dishes…. The dancers will use their bodies and the bodies of their partners without regard to the conventions. There will be little restraint…. And in addition to the liquor sold by the house, flasks of gin, and corn and rye will be passed around and emptied. Here “low” Harlem is in its glory, primitive and unashamed.

  I have counted as many as twelve such parties in one block, five in one apartment house containing forty flats…. It serves a real and vital purpose, and is as essential to “low Harlem” as the cultured receptions and soirees held on “strivers’ row” are to “high Harlem.”

  House rent parties have their evils; it is an economic evil and a social evil that makes them necessary, but they also have their virtues…. House rent parties do provide a source of revenue to those in difficult financial straits, and they also give lonesome Harlemites, caged in by intangible bars, some place to have their fun and forget problems of color, civilization, and economics.

  While the rent party was an invaluable economic survival tool for many residents, it was also a community social event that drew the people of Harlem together. In addition, rent parties provided basic training for many of the finest jazz musicians to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, including Willie “the Lion” Smith, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Luckey Roberts, Mezz Mezzrow, Eubie Blake, and James P. Johnson. Several popular songs were composed about rent parties, the most famous being “The Joint Is Jumpin’” by Fats Waller and Duke Ellington’s “Saturday Night Function.”

  Does it Explode?:

  The Legacy of Harlem

  There could not have been a renaissance without Harlem. So many of the divergent rivers of history—World War I, the boll weevil, the rise of jazz, Jim Crow laws—flowed into one city at the same time, allowing all those elements to mix together and wash through Harlem like a biblical flood, only this time it was a cleansing and nurturing tide. And fed on that water, Harlem grew out of the shadows of white Manhattan—and white America—to become a cultural center that would change the rest of the country.

  As it had in the past for African-Americans, change came slowly, and not without reversals. But it did come, and faster than before. Blacks across the country had found a unified voice—a voice that emanated from the neighborhoods of Harlem and spread from coast to coast as if broadcast from a powerful radio station. And, having found that voice, they were willing to raise that voice. Loudly. And often. Harlem had come to represent the distant dream of what life in America might one day be for blacks. And the congregation of minds that created the Harlem Renaissance made it clear that they would not let that dream go gentle into that good night. Langston Hughes expresses that commitment of black voices in his cautionary poem “A Dream Deferred”:

  What happens to a dream deferred?

  Does it dry up

  Like a raisin in the sun?

  Or fester like a sore—

  And then run?

  Does it stink like rotten meat?

  Or crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet?

  Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

  Or does it explode?

  “Mad Medley”

  How Harlem

  Influenced My Life

  By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  The Harlem I was born into in 1947 was no longer the Mecca of the New Negro, the Capital of Black America, or Pickaninny Paradise. It was just plain old Harlem, a bunch of rectangular neighborhoods, some well-off, some fallen on hard times, where most people tried their best to make a decent living and raise a decent family. Fancy limousines carrying white celebrities no longer prowled the streets looking for the next hot jazz club to experience the “jungle passions” of African-American dancers and musicians. White America had long since stopped finding Harlem exotic and was looking around for some other in vogue ethnic group to embody the sensual desires they themselves could only express through a “primitive” proxy.

  The one thing my Harlem had in common with the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance was that most of the faces in Harlem were still black. The families walking on the streets were black, the teller at the bank was black, the faces on the billboards were black, even the cop on the corner was black. Having black skin didn’t mean you were automatically a good human being, but at least here in Harlem you were more likely to be judged, in Dr. King’s words, by the content of your character rather than the color of your skin. Writer Wallace Thurman, the Harlem Renaissance’s most incisive chronicler, said that “the sight of Harlem gives any Negro a feeling of great security.” That was true then, it was true when I was there, and it’s still true now. Though it may no longer be the bubbling cauldron of black artistic magic that it was during the Renaissance, it is still something of a homeland for black Americans.

  The Harlem of my youth isn’t the Harlem of Louis Armstrong or Langston Hughes’s youth; nor does the Harlem of today resemble the Harlem I used to frequent. Today there’s a Starbucks, a Disney Store, an Old Navy, a Gap—and the offices of former president Bill Clinton. But it doesn’t matter how trendy or mall-like it becomes on the outside, it will always be populated by people of color who know that shopping at the Gap or the Disney Store won’t make them any less black in the eyes of white America. They still have to face that challenge every day. But in Harlem, surrounded by your own, it doesn’t have to be faced quite so relentlessly.

  During the Harlem Renaissance, tens of thousands of black people came to Harlem from the South or West Indies, all looking for a better life. Many thought it would be some kind of paradise on earth, free of the kind of soul-crushing poverty and humiliating racism they’d lived with all their lives. Among those migrants were some of the greatest teachers, intellectuals, writers, artists, and performers in American history. These men and women had a vision for the future of black Americans, and they had the dedication to try to make that vision a reality. They didn’t always agree on the method, but they did agree that great change was necessary, and that they wanted to be an active part of causing that change. Though the Harlem Renaissance is long passed, that activist spirit still pulsates within Harlem. Stand at the crossroads of Malcolm X Boulevard and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, named after two men with different methods but a shared vision, and you are standing at the crossroads of both the history and the future of African-Americans. Wallace Thurman once said, “Harlem is a dream city pregnant with wide-awake realities. It is a masterpiece of contradictory elements and surprising types. There is no end to its versatile presentation of people, personalities, and institutions. It is a mad medley.” That “mad medley” can still be heard and seen on the streets of Harlem. Harlem remains a place where people of color can define themselves beyond color—as individual men and women—and as members of the African-American community.

  I should know, it happened to me.

  I was born in Harlem in the summer of 1947; I was re born in Harlem in the summer of 1964.

  Slouching Toward Harlem

  If my high school coach hadn’t called me a nigger, I might not have rediscovered Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance until I was much older, when it wouldn’t probably have had the same dramatic effect on me.

  Though I was born in Harlem, my parents moved us out when I was three. As was common at the time in overcrowded Harlem, we’d been sharing an eight-room apartment with six other tenants. My family had two front rooms, with me having my own bedroom. Then in 1950, when the Dyckman Street projects in the Inwood section of Manhattan were completed, my parents moved us there immediately. In contrast to our neighborhood in Harlem, the projects were only about 15 percent black. Our new neighbors were much more international: Russians, Puerto Ricans,
Gypsies, Cubans, Scandinavians.

  When I was in my junior year at Power Memorial Academy, a Catholic high school, Jack Donahue was my coach, my “agent,” my friend. He had trained and guided us through a tremendous winning streak of over forty games. I was receiving a lot of letters of interest from college basketball teams, but all the letters went directly to Coach Donahue, the contents of which he never shared with me, saying only that I could attend any college I wanted. I liked the man—he pushed us, but he cared about us. More important, I trusted him.

  We were playing St. Helena’s, a team we should have been beating soundly. But we were up by only six points and the coach was enraged. After berating the entire team, he pointed an accusing finger at me and said, “And you! You go out there and you don’t hustle. You don’t move. You don’t do any of the things you’re supposed to do. You’re acting just like a nigger!”

  The air seemed to be instantly sucked out of the room and I was left sitting there, just trying to breathe. It was like waking up in the middle of the night and finding your favorite uncle pressing a pillow against your face, trying to smother you. Finally, I found my breath, we won the game, and afterward Donahue called me into his office to explain. “See, it worked!” he announced with a victorious smile. “My strategy worked. I knew that if I used that word, it’d shock you into a good second half. And it did.”

  Yeah, we won. We went on to win the city championship. We were voted the top Catholic high school team in the country. We were winners.

  But at what cost?

  Sure, Donahue didn’t think he was being racist, just a motivator. For my own good. He wanted me to play up to my potential. In his heart he cared about me, but his brain should have recognized how I would react. I was big, but I was still a kid. The insult wasn’t in his intention; it was in not recognizing the personal damage he was willing to risk for the sake of winning. It was in his feeling he had license to use that word with me—for any reason.

  Life went on—I still had a year to play for him—but things were never the same between us. Especially that summer of ’64.

  Donahue ran a summer camp, mostly for kids from Power, which I’d attended for the last two summers. This year the camp had gone through some major changes: Donahue had refurbished the courts, advertised it as a basketball camp, and for the first time had paying campers. And I was a main draw. But I was going through some major changes of my own and preferred to stay in New York for the summer, not with the man who had betrayed me. However, pressure from my mother, who wanted me safely off the streets during a time of growing civil rights unrest, and a lingering sense of duty to the man, made me agree to attend his camp. Not for the full eight weeks, but three weeks at the end of summer. That left me most of the summer in the city.

  Having spent the last couple years in a mostly white school, living in a mostly white neighborhood, I’d become a little removed from my own culture—so removed that I didn’t even realize I was removed. I’d been well versed in the music of the African-American culture from my father, who was a jazz musician and graduate of Juilliard. He’d exposed me to some of the greatest jazz music from the Harlem Renaissance, but I no longer knew much about the people of Harlem. Although I’d been to Harlem several times since moving away, it was usually only for a basketball game. I’d arrive, play ball, maybe grab a bite, and immediately leave. I was more like a tourist.

  Then I did something that changed my life.

  That summer I signed up as part of the Harlem Youth Action Project (HARYOU-ACT), a city-sponsored antipoverty program designed both to keep kids off the streets and to teach them something about their heritage. The man in charge of our little group of overachievers was Dr. John Henrik Clarke, the head of the Heritage Teaching Program. Dr. Clarke was a well-known historian who had published notable articles such as “Africa in the Conquest of Spain” and “Harlem as Mecca and New Jerusalem,” as well as books about Marcus Garvey and American Heritage’s two-volume History of Africa.

  I’d always had a fascination with history and felt fortunate that I was spending my summer with a man like Dr. Clarke rather than Coach Donahue. Dr. Clarke had gone through some similar experiences as I had in terms of questioning what I’d been taught—or rather hadn’t been taught—about African-American history. When he was a young Sunday-school teacher, he’d been disturbed that he couldn’t find any images of his own people in the Bible. “I began to suspect that something had gone wrong in history,” he once said. “I see Moses going down to Ethiopia, where he marries Zipporah, Moses’ wife, and she turns white. I see people going to the land of Kush, which is the present-day Sudan, and they got white. I see people going to Punt, which is present-day Somalia, and they got white. What are all these white people doing in Africa? There were no Africans in Africa, in the Sunday school lesson.” Then one day he saw a recitalist at the high school carrying a copy of The New Negro, the anthology of essays, fiction, art, and poetry, compiled by Alain Locke (see the chapter “Master Intellects and Creative Giants”), that helped define the goals of the Harlem Renaissance. Young John Clarke read an essay in the book, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” and like so many black Americans who read that book, he was changed forever. “That was a key moment in my life,” he said. “I made up my mind that we did have a history. For the first time, I read something on the ancient history of African people. I can’t tell you how important that was to me.”

  Dr. Clarke, who had been so inspired by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, shared his passion for African-American history with all of us, but somehow his messages seemed directly tailored for me. “History is not everything,” Dr. Clarke once wrote, “but it is the starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.” Coach Donahue had taught me how to play basketball, how to win games, but Dr. Clarke taught me how to find my place within my own community, within my own history. In a way, it was appropriate that my cultural reawakening came through the use of the n-word. I had been a little too comfortable being the young basketball star, a little out of reach of the kind of racism that others faced daily. Ironically, it was Coach Donahue who, by keeping me immersed in basketball, kept me insulated; and it was Coach Donahue who reminded me that such insulation was a fantasy that could be shattered at his discretion. That was all over now. Dr. Clarke encouraged us to explore our own past as well as what was going on in the streets now. Coach Donahue wanted us to become great basketball players, to achieve personal success; Dr. Clarke wanted us to become great African-Americans, to enlighten. Dr. Clarke hoped that training Harlem’s youth in areas such as art, music, social work, photography, or journalism, those trainees would be able to make Harlem a better place when they became adults. “In regards to our precious young people,” he explained, “they are really the seeds of tomorrow’s crop, and our hope for immortality rests with them. They owe it to themselves, and to us, to pick out the finest things among us as examples, follow these examples and improve upon them. They are the makers of tomorrow. We changed the world once. We’ll change it again.”

  Our job was to produce a weekly journal about Harlem life. We worked out of a tiny office in the basement of the 135th Street YMCA Annex. While the rest of Harlem enjoyed the warm sunshine of summer, we pecked away on the ancient black typewriters in the dank, windowless room. Dr. Clarke’s assignments forced us to do research, some on the streets, but a lot at the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Originally, this had merely been a branch of the city library. But thanks to Puerto Rican–born black scholar and bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, who donated his enormous collection of books on black history, the Schomburg Center was one of the world’s richest sources for learning about black history. For me, walking into that building for the first time was like discovering the Holy Grail. Surrounded by all this information about the past of my people, I f
elt…unleashed. I returned again and again, with monklike devotion. I pored over every sacred scrap of information I could find about the legends of the Harlem Renaissance: black nationalist Marcus Garvey, black revolutionary W. E. B. Du Bois, the poetry of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston and Wallace Thurman. All these talented and earnest young men and women posing all the same questions that had been bothering me all my life, but I’d never found anyone I could ask. Now I didn’t have to. I could just read their insightful words and feel myself filling up, not just with knowledge, but also with pride. How could I be a senior in high school and have not even heard of the Harlem Renaissance?

  Now I learned everything I could about it. After a long session in the Schomburg, I would walk out onto the streets of Harlem and notice some of the similarities between the Harlem of the Renaissance era and Harlem now. Unrest, frustration, distrust, were as thick as the humid summer air. Black militants such as Malcolm X hollered about injustice from the same soapboxes that Marcus Garvey used to speak from. Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam, which advocated an aggressive approach to achieving racial equality, was at odds with the nonviolence advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At one speech in Harlem, some Black Muslims actually stoned Dr. King. The following year Malcolm was assassinated in Manhattan by three members of the Nation of Islam. Racial tensions had gone far beyond just blacks versus whites. And gone was the respectful tolerance that the disagreeing black leaders of the Harlem Renaissance had shown toward each other.

  The Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in voting, public accommodations, and employment, had just been passed, and white backlash was instantaneous—and violent. In June, three young men—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—who had gone to Mississippi to help register black voters as part of what was known as Freedom Summer suddenly disappeared. Hundreds of volunteers searched for them, finally turning up their murdered bodies. Twenty men, including several police officers, were indicted. Racial tensions across the country were heating up along with the summer weather.