Harlem Stomp!
Page 5
THE “NEGRO SCARE” RACKET
A particularly horrendous scam arose to prey on whites’ fear of a black invasion. It was called the “Negro Scare” racket. The way it worked was that unscrupulous men would purchase a building in an exclusively white neighborhood and rent the apartments to blacks. The horrified white residents of the block would then attempt to buy the building to keep it segregated. The owner would initially resist selling, but would then sell the building for an outrageous price.
By 1910, the animosity between the two communities was beyond repair. Either the whites or the blacks would have to go. With only the slums of Black Bohemia as an alternative, blacks doubled their efforts to move to and remain in Harlem. They not only continued to rent apartments outside the segregated zone east of Lenox Avenue but began to purchase the fine private dwellings west of Seventh Avenue as well as those bordering on St. Nicholas Park.
St. Philips Protestant Episcopal Church, 133rd St. near 7th Ave., the most exclusive black church in New York City and one of the largest property owners in Harlem.
THE LEGENDARY PIG FOOT MARY
The most legendary real estate investor in Harlem was a woman nicknamed Pig Foot Mary. She parlayed a street-corner food stand into a profitable real estate empire. Pig Foot Mary, whose real name was Lillian Harris, arrived in New York City in the fall of 1901. During her first week in New York, Mary went to work as a domestic and earned five dollars. With three of those dollars she bought a used baby carriage and a large washtub. The other two she spent on pigs’ feet, a popular delicacy among Southern blacks. Then she made a deal with the owner of Rudolph’s, a busy saloon near Sixty-first Street on Amsterdam Avenue, to cook the pigs’ feet in his kitchen. Once prepared, she placed the entire washtub full of pigs’ feet on her baby carriage and wheeled it onto the street in front of the saloon. In no time the pigs’ feet were selling so fast that Mary expanded her menu and added hog-maws, chitterlings (cooked hogs’ intestines), and corn-on-thecob. To handle this wide fare, Pig Foot Mary designed and built a portable steam table, one of the first in the city, and worked her stand from early morning until late at night.
In 1917, Pig Foot Mary followed her migrant customers to Harlem, where she rented a small stall at Lenox Avenue and 135th Street. Shortly afterward, she started investing her savings in Harlem properties. Her first venture was the purchase of a Seventh Avenue apartment house for $44,000, just a few blocks from her stand. Six years later in 1923 she sold the building for $72,000. Her subsequent dealings in real estate were equally successful, and at one time her total holdings were valued at $375,000 ($3,945,000 in today’s dollars).
Whites responded to this “invasion” by abandoning the neighborhood. House after house, apartment building after apartment building, became deserted. Perhaps in a rare twist of justice, the white property owners who held out against the black tide were the ones who suffered the most in the end. While they resisted selling to blacks, their neighbors did not. Soon these white owners had nothing but empty buildings because their white tenants had moved. Eventually they were forced to sell at prices far below market value. One classic example was the Equitable Life Assurance Society sale of some eighty brick houses on West 138th Street, designed by the famous architect Stanford White. Each of these homes contained fourteen rooms, two baths, French doors, and hardwood floors. The Equitable Life Assurance Society received a mere $2,000 ($36,340 in today’s dollars) for each house, at least half as much as its market value if it were located elsewhere in the city. These buildings became known as “Strivers Row,” the stronghold of the black upper class.
Eventually, Harlem became such a popular destination for blacks that by the time of the Great Migration from the South to the North and a similar immigration from the West Indies, real estate prices had rocketed to incredible heights. As a result, investors who bought cheap in the depressed market made a killing. The Reverend Adam E. Clayton Powell Sr. reported the purchase of a limestone-front private house with mahogany woodwork on West 136th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues for $6,000 ($109,020 in today’s dollars), which was resold six years later for $15,000 ($272,550 in today’s dollars). By the 1920s, conservative estimates placed the total Negro ownership of Harlem property at $200 million ($1.8 billion in today’s dollars).
If you ride northward the length of Manhattan Island, going through Central Park and coming out on Seventh Avenue or Lenox Avenue at One Hundred and Tenth Street, you cannot escape being struck by the sudden change in the character of the people you see. In the middle and lower parts of the city you have, perhaps, noted Negro faces here and there; but when you emerge from the Park, you see them everywhere, and as you go up either of these two great arteries leading out from the city to the north, you see more and more Negroes, walking in the streets, looking from the windows, trading in the shops, eating in the restaurants, going in and coming out of the theatres, until, nearly One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street, ninety per cent of the people you see, including traffic officers, are Negroes.
— James Weldon Johnson, from Black Manhattan
Aaron Douglas illustration for the September 1927 Crisis cover.
THE
DAM
BREAKING
JEAN TOOMER, CLAUDE MCKAY, AND OPPORTUNITY IN THE ARTS, 1921–1924
“Up you mighty race!
You can accomplish what you will!”
— MARCUS GARVEY
THE RISE OF A RACE
GARVEY’S FAMOUS CHANT was prophetic. African Americans everywhere began to rise as if from a deep sleep and to demand their rightful place in American culture. During the latter part of the 1920s, black pride surged. A new race-consciousness centered on self-worth emerged in nearly all walks of black life — from the rise of Harlem as a true black metropolis to the African-American heroes of World War I.
1914 SPINGARN MEDAL INSTITUTED FOR BLACK ACHIEVEMENT
Joel E. Spingarn, former chairman of the Board of Directors of the NAACP, instituted a medal to be given annually to the African-American man or woman who attained the highest achievement during the preceding year or years. Winners have been honored for their work in art, music, literature, theater, dance, photography, science, medicine, business, politics, public service, law, education, the military, civil rights, and sports. Many of the most celebrated figures of the era won this award, including the composer and baritone Harry T. Burleigh, folklorist and novelist Charles W. Chesnutt, and marine biologist Everett Just, among others.
At the beginning of the war, W. E. B. Du Bois had called upon African Americans in his famous editorial in the Crisis to “forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder. . . . We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and willingly with our eyes lifted to the hills.” Now they were ready to ascend that hill and receive what was rightfully theirs as citizens of a democracy.
As a result of black pride, a seismic change in American culture occurred. African Americans began to earn a long-deserved, publicly acknowledged presence on the national stage, particularly in the worlds of music, art, theater, and literature. For generations African Americans had been active in these cultural fields, but with the exception of theater their efforts had gone largely unacknowledged outside the black community. From the perspective of white culture, this emergence appeared sudden, almost instantaneous, but in reality it had been building for years. In fact, for decades much of the African-American arts had been assimilated into the national culture without any conscious acknowledgment. For example, the sacred music from black churches became popular spirituals sung by all churchgoers. Similarly, black secular music — plantation songs, ragtime, blues, jazz, and work songs — were embraced nationally. And folklore — Uncle Remus stories and other plantation tales — had been appropriated in the daily newspapers as popular bedtime stories. It took W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, however, to lay the groundwork with their own novels and poetry so that writers such as Jean Toomer and Claude McKay could b
reak the glass ceiling of artistic segregation and be celebrated for their individual achievements.
DAM BREAKERS: CLAUDE MCKAY & JEAN TOOMER
UNTIL CLAUDE MCKAY published two sonnets in a 1916 issue of Seven Arts, a white literary publication, the last African-American poet published by whites was Paul Lawrence Dunbar just after the turn of the century. Of Dunbar’s broad and varied work white publishers were interested only in his dialect poems, which were concerned with such stereotypical Negro themes as the sound of the old banjo, singing around the cabin door, and the successive seasons of watermelon, possum, and sweet potato. A classic example of the dialectal style is Dunbar’s “Soliloquy of a Turkey”:
Dey’s a so’t o’ threatenin’ feelin’ in de blowin’ of de breeze,
An I’s feelin’ kin’ o’ squeamish in de night;
I’s a-walkin’ ’roun’ a-lookin’ at de diffunt style o’ trees,
An’ a-measurin’ dey thickness an’ day height.
Fu’ dey’s somep’n mighty ’spicious in de looks de da’kies give,
Ez dey pass me an’ my fambly in de groun’
So it ’curs to me dat lakly, ef I caihs to try an’ live,
It concehns me fu’ to ’mence to look erroun’. . . .
This poem is in sharp contrast to other poems by Dunbar, such as his sonnet “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” an eloquent tribute to the famous abolitionist:
She told the story, and the whole world wept
At wrongs and cruelties it had not known
But for this fearless woman’s voice alone.
She spoke to concsciences that long had slept:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Blest be the hand that dared be strong to save,
And blest be she who in our weakness came —
Prophet and priestess! At one stroke she gave
A race to freedom and herself to fame.
“You’re a lost crowd, you educated Negroes, and you will only find your self in the roots of your own people.”
The cover for Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem, 1928.
At the turn of the century Dunbar in his writing had to wear the mask of the rural, uneducated Negro laborer in order to gain recognition from the wider American culture. Consequently, McKay’s achievement as a poet was not just unique, it was unheard of. In keeping with the tone of the brewing racial renaissance, he removed the “Negro” mask and expressed himself in the voice of an intelligent, sensitive African American. As well, his poems expressed what the African-American masses felt, thought, and wanted to hear, and suddenly this forthright style was not to be ignored by the dominant white culture. In McKay’s novel Banjo, the character named Ray describes what is necessary for the renaissance to succeed:
We educated Negroes are talking a lot about a racial renaissance. And I wonder how we’re going to get it. . . . If this renaissance we’re talking about is going to be more than a sporadic and scabby thing, we’ll have to get down to our racial roots to create it . . . [but] you’re a lost crowd, you educated Negroes, and you will only find your self in the roots of your own people. You can’t choose your models the haughty-minded educated white youths of a society living on its imperial conquests.
CLAUDE MCKAY, 1890–1948
Born in 1890, Festus Claude McKay grew up on a farm in Jamaica, where he was the youngest of eleven children. When he was a child, his parents steeped him in the rural farming traditions of Jamaica and passed on to him a deep sympathy for the oppressed. His early poems were written in the dialect of black country folk, with whom he felt a real kinship. As a young man, McKay came to the United States to study at Tuskegee Normal School in Alabama and later at Kansas State University, but he never completed the work necessary for a degree. Instead he moved to New York City in 1914, where he wrote for radical socialist journals such as Seven Arts and Liberator. Though McKay modeled his style on Elizabethan and Romantic lyrics, his subjects were racially militant and politically radical. He found American society hopelessly corrupted by racism and greed. His work spoke out primarily against these two evils, which won him the label of “the enfant terrible of the Harlem Reniassance.” The candid style McKay developed focused on the depiction of an authentic blackness, and his work set the stage for the poets of the renaissance.
Claude McKay
Two Poems by Claude McKay
THE WHITE HOUSE
Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
A chafing savage, down the decent street;
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom and sore and raw,
And find in it the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of your law!
Oh, I must keep the heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate.
AMERICA
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into me through her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand.
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
The open expression of authentic blackness created the feeling of racial vitality that African Americans were hungry for. The book that set the tone for this artistic explosion was Jean Toomer’s brilliant novel Cane. Published in 1923, Cane was one of the first books published by the white establishment to depict African-American characters and culture authentically, rather than as caricatures. This novel and the literature it inspired rejected the old stereotypes and substituted instead notions of self-respect, self-reliance, and racial unity. William Stanley Braithwaite, the most respected black literary critic of the prerenaissance period, wrote of Toomer’s Cane:
In Jean Toomer . . . we come upon the very first artist of the race, who with all an artist’s passion and sympathy of life, its hurts, its sympathies, its desires, its joys, its defeats, and strange yearning, can write about the Negro without surrender or compromise of the artist’s vision. . . . Cane is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and flame, of ecstasy and pain, and Jean Toomer is the bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature.
JEAN TOOMER, 1894–1967
Jean Toomer; a cabin in Sparta, Georgia, that Toomer photographed in 1921.
Born in 1894 into the so-called black bourgeoisie, Toomer was the grandson of P. B. S. Pinchback, a light-skinned Reconstruction-era politician who made his home in Washington, D.C. Toomer was so light-skinned that he was easily mistaken for white. He was raised mostly by his grandfather, who was the first U.S. governor of African-American descent. An excellent student, he attended the University of Wisconsin to study agriculture in 1913, but he did not graduate. Instead, he sampled classes at a number of colleges and schools in Massachusetts, Chicago, and New York. By 1919, however, he had settled in New York City’s Greenwich Village and set out to become a writer. By 1921, he became restless and accepted a position as a substitute teacher at a black school in a part of rural Georgia. His two months in Sparta, Georgia, introduced him to the abject poverty of black rural life as well as its rich musical and folk traditions. There, he witnessed for t
he first time the barely submerged fears and frustrations of black people who were facing discrimination and violence in the South. On his return trip north, Toomer began to form his initial ideas for the book that would become Cane. Although called a novel, Cane is a mixture of poetry, fiction, and drama that defies classification but is often called “experimental fiction.” The work is essentially fragments that come together, much like a patchwork quilt, to create a unified narrative. Most important, Toomer’s Cane created a standard of excellence for the literature of the Harlem Renaissance.
Excerpt from Toomer’s Cane
KABNIS
Ralph Kabnis, propped in his bed, tried to read. To read himself to sleep. An oil lamp on a chair near his elbow burns unsteadily. The cabin room is spaced fantastically about it. Whitewashed hearth and chimney, black with sooty sawteeth. Ceiling, patterned by the fringed globe of the lamp. The walls, unpainted, are seasoned a rosin yellow. And cracks between the boards are black. These cracks are the lips the night winds use for whispering. Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering. Kabnis, against his will, lets his books slip down, and listens to them. The warm whiteness of his bed, the lamp-light, do not protect him from the weird chill of their song: