Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film 9780813555898

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Making a Promised Land

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Making a Promised Land Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film

PAULA J. MASSOOD

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RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Massood, Paula J., 1965– Making a promised land : Harlem in twentieth-century photography and film / Paula J. Massood. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–5588–1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–5587–4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–5589–8 (e-book) 1. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—History—20th century. N.Y.)—In motion pictures. New York.

2.

Harlem (New York,

3. African American neighborhoods—New York (State)—

I. Title.

F128.68.H3M37

2013

974.7⬘100904—dc23

2012012089

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2013 by Paula J. Massood All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

In memory of my father, Arthur F. Massood (1938–2011)

In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital. —Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” 1925

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: The Era of the New Negro: African American Politics and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Harlem 1

African American Aesthetics and the City: Picturing the Black Bourgeoisie in New York

2

51

Delinquents in the Making: Harlem’s Representational Turn toward “Marketable Shock”

4

5

20

Heaven and Hell in Harlem: Urban Aesthetics for a Renaissance People

3

1

88

Gangster’s Paradise: Drugs and Crime in Harlem, from Blaxploitation to New Jack Cinema

126

Echoes of a Renaissance: Harlem’s Nostalgic Turn

159

Conclusion: Making and Remaking a Promised Land: Harlem’s Continuing Revisions

Notes

199

Index

231

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project began with a simple series of questions: what is film’s status within African American aesthetics, and how might we look to films set in Harlem, the “Mecca of the New Negro,” as an indicator of the cinema’s role in the construction of African American identity? What appeared to be straightforward questions soon revealed an expansive history of cinema’s relationship to Harlem, one that broadened my query from film to other areas of visual culture and opened my eyes to the complex interactions of art, politics, and economics at play in the neighborhood. Over the years, my exploration of Harlem in African American photography and film, and vice versa, has taken me on a journey through archives and across different media, from microfiche copies of the New York Age to interactive websites promoting the “Harlem USA” development in Upper Manhattan. It has also brought me in contact with a number of people—colleagues, archivists, friends, and strangers—whose intellectual curiosity and generosity contributed to helping shape what appears in the following pages. It goes without saying that my colleagues at Brooklyn College were instrumental in the completion of Making a Promised Land. The seeds for what became a book were first nurtured during a fellowship year provided by the Ethyl R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College. I extend my gratitude to Robert Viscusi and George Cunningham for their work with the institute and their ongoing support of faculty scholarship. During the writing of this work, I was also fortunate to receive a Tow Professorship, awarded by Leonard and Claire Tow to foster faculty research. The Tow Award provided travel funds and other financial support related to this project, luxuries that are increasingly rare in an environment of fiscal austerity in higher education. My compatriots in the Department of Film—especially Daniel Gurskis, Liz Weis, Kara Lynn Andersen, Sarah Christman, Becky MacDonald, Bill Hornsby, Virginia Brooks, and Matthew Moore—have been supportive of my work over the years, and I am thankful for their interest in film scholarship in particular and their delightful enthusiasm for the cinema as a whole. I would also like to express my gratitude to the former provost, Roberta S. Matthews, for her support while she was part of the Brooklyn College community. As no scholarship is performed in a vacuum, I wish xi

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to acknowledge the fabulous film majors at Brooklyn College for asking hard questions, doubting any easy answers, and always reminding me why I love what I do. Finally, my sincere appreciation goes to Alberto Mojica, a talented filmmaker and scholar, who took time from filmmaking to assist me with film stills. Although Brooklyn College may sometimes seem like a small place, it is part of the much larger City University of New York system, which has provided me with the invaluable opportunity to collaborate with talented faculty from departments and institutions across the university. I had the lucky fortune to formulate the early stages of Making a Promised Land while participating in the “Transformative Cities” seminar hosted by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center. I would like to express my gratitude to the seminar co-coordinators, Neil Smith and Ida Sussman, and to the seminar’s faculty and student participants from across CUNY for encouraging me to broaden my historical work to present-day Harlem. I also want to acknowledge my colleagues in the Film Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center—David Gerstner, Cynthia Chris, Edward Miller, Ivone Margulies, Alison Griffiths, and William Boddy, among others—many who heard an early draft of chapter 1 as part of the FSCP’s Film and Media Lecture Series. In addition, I had the excellent help of two graduate assistants from the Graduate Center’s Program in Theatre, Andrew Kirchner and Ryan Donovan, both of whom provided research assistance at different moments in the preparation of this manuscript. Over the years, I have been invited to present my research to scholarly communities outside CUNY, opportunities that provided welcome and useful feedback for various parts of Making a Promised Land. For generously asking me to visit their institutions, I would like to acknowledge the following individuals: Amy Corbin and the Center for Ethics at Muhlenberg College; Erica Stein and Corey Creekmur at the University of Iowa; David Desser, for hosting the “Global Gangsters: Crime and International Cinema Conference,” at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Richard Grusin at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Christoph Linder at the University of Amsterdam, and organizer of the “Globalization and Violence” conference at the University of London Center in Paris; Antje Ascheid and the Film Studies faculty at the University of Georgia; and Patrice Petro and Linda R. Krause, organizers of the “Sustaining Cities: Urban Lost and Found” conference at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Many of the individuals mentioned above have become good friends of mine, and I am thankful for their interest in my research and their friendship. In particular, I would like to thank Patrice Petro and Andy Martin for generously hosting me on more than one trip to beautiful Milwaukee. I had the pleasure of serving as the treasurer for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies much of the time that I was writing Making a Promised Land. While

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members of the board were busy juggling the demands of their home institutions with their responsibilities to SCMS, many were interested in and supportive of each other’s work. For their commitment to film and media scholarship—and their love of screen images in general—I am grateful to Patrice Petro, Vicky Johnson, Jackie Stewart, Andrew Miller, Bambi Haggins, Lucy Fischer, Ann Kaplan, Mary Celeste Kearney, Scott Curtis, Hollis Griffin, Kevin Sanson, Jamie Poster, Chris Holmlund, and Stephen Prince. Portions of this work were also presented at SCMS conferences, and I would like to thank Sabine Haenni for organizing the panel “Imagining the Urban” in 2010, and Michael B. Gillespie for the “Historiographies of Black Visual Culture” panel in 2011. I would also like to send a very special thank you to Leslie LeMond, the heart and soul of SCMS. Making a Promised Land is also the product of the efforts of a number of key individuals at Rutgers University Press and other institutions. First, I’m indebted to my editor, Leslie Mitchner, who had the vision to imagine this as a complete project very early in its development. I appreciate many of Leslie’s talents, not the least of which is her patience with authors and her love of a good book. My thanks go also to Lisa Boyajian at Rutgers for her assistance in guiding Making a Promised Land from manuscript to completed book. In the process of finishing the manuscript I came across a godsend in the humanly form of Anna Husted, a graduate student in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Without Anna’s stellar research skills, perseverance, and sense of humor, many of the images integral to my argument would never have made it to these pages. And for their help with obtaining image permissions, I would like to thank Nick Chen and Peter Kunhardt Jr. at the Gordon Parks Foundation, Antony Toussaint at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Thomas Lisanti of the New York Public Library, Jessica Desany Ganong at the Peabody Museum, Nkenge Stocks and Erica Kelly at the Library of Congress, and all the people—including individuals at the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Jewish Museum, and elsewhere—who assisted with my attempts to identify the photographer responsible for the haunting Five Social Problems image that appears in chapter 3. I am also grateful to Barron Claiborne for generously granting permission to use his striking Couple in Raccoon Coats and to Alice Attie for the use of three images from Harlem on the Verge in the conclusion to Making a Promised Land. The later stages of this book were written at a difficult time for my family, and I am forever grateful for the love and friendship of a number of people. First, my gratitude goes to my dear friend David Gerstner. If not for his intellect, humor, and editing skills, Making a Promised Land would have been a far weaker project. I’m also indebted to the following wonderful friends and scholars: Alex Keller, Frazer Ward, Carla Marcantonio, Cindy Lucia, Simon Fenwick, and members of the Saturday Medieval Club (who welcomed a scholar of twentieth-

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and twenty-first-century media into their world). And last, but never least, Matthew Boyd Goldie has supported me through every step of this project, from deceivingly simple framing questions to completed manuscript. Friend, lover, editor, chef, and travel companion: he is my everything. During the writing of Making a Promised Land, my father, Arthur F. Massood, passed away. Although not a scholar in theory, his always inquisitive mind made him one in practice. His love of film opened a world to me as a young girl. This book is dedicated to his memory.

Making a Promised Land

Introduction ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Era of the New Negro African American Politics and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Harlem

Negro Harlem is practically a development of the past decade, but the story behind it goes back a long way. —James Weldon Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” 1925

Contemporary discussions of Harlem invariably focus on how it was—and continues to be—an African American space. What this means depends on the speaker, but what is indisputable is that Harlem remains, in Charles S. Johnson’s words, “the Mecca of the Negroes the country over.”1 Harlem has maintained its legendary status as a black neighborhood over the decades, through multiple economic ups and downs and shifts in African American and American politics. Nevertheless, a wave of economic growth that began in earnest in the late 1990s has challenged this identity. For the development’s supporters, the combined presence of former President Bill Clinton and a host of chain stores, such as Old Navy and Starbucks, is a sign of the area’s revitalization and integration into American life. For those less enthusiastic about the changes, the influx of big business threatens to transform the symbolic site of black America into nothing more than a carbon copy of middle—white— America. Though economic in its focus, the roots of the tension between preserving black Harlem and contemporary expansion reside in the area’s iconographic status as an African American place, one maintained through a variety of visual and written texts over the past century. As suggested by recent anthropological, sociological, and artistic works about the area, Harlem’s reputation as the African American community exerts a fundamental influence over its public reputation.2 Even in the wake of massive changes—in architecture, in economics, in politics—Harlem appears almost frozen in time, with present-day descriptions and images of the space relying on, perhaps clinging to, what John L. Jackson Jr. has referred to as a “wasness” that “tethers [it] to another time altogether.” For Jackson, “Harlem is famous today almost exclusively because the argument can be made that it . . . 1

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was famous in the past, way back ‘When Harlem was in vogue.’”3 But why such nostalgia? What fuels the desire to cling to the area’s history as an African American community even as its demographics—and American politics in general—have changed? And what role has art, particularly film and photography, played in representing an urban space that so solidly signifies African American progress and citizenship? This discussion opens with Charles S. Johnson’s 1925 reference to Harlem as a “Mecca” so as to situate the following analysis in a historical context that at once addresses the importance of the arts and letters of the Renaissance era, but that also reminds us, as James Weldon Johnson was suggesting in the opening epigraph from the same year, that Harlem’s story is more complex than first appearances may suggest. To understand Harlem’s enduring legacy as both a cultural product and as a public discourse, therefore, we must consider three interconnected forces. First, we should assay the development of the area in the historical context of urbanization, industrialization, and migration, all of which have been factors in Harlem’s growth since its annexation to New York City in the late nineteenth century. Second, as the area’s reputation as a promised land developed, it emerged as the site on which African American politics and aesthetics—the latter being umbilically tied to the former—have been debated, defined, and redefined. Third, such deliberations over the status of the “New Negro” were often fought visually as well as verbally, and the new technologies of photography and film joined other visual arts—painting and printmaking in particular—in defining the imagistic contours of African American life in a new century. In what ways, then, were photography and film marshaled for African American political causes? Was there a hierarchy of acceptable African American aesthetics? And what role did (and does) Harlem play in this dynamic? Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film explores these and related questions by looking at the changing faces of Harlem produced by photography and film over the past century and considering the ways such images have come to stand for African American and, by extension, American experience.

Harlem: “Manhattan’s First Suburb” While the establishment of Harlem’s African American population is most often associated with the years following World War I and the demographic shifts associated with the Great Migration, the blocks above 125th Street and west of Lenox Avenue were identified prior to this time as viable neighborhoods for black settlement, a fact reflected in the real estate ads in newspapers such as the New York Age and the Amsterdam News as early as 1905. The arrival of the area’s first black residents was not only a financial fix for white landlords desperate for a return on their uptown investments, it also promised to satisfy the needs of an

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African American community forced to live in slums elsewhere in the city. African American real estate concerns like Philip A. Payton Jr.’s Afro-American Realty Company (with financial backing from Booker T. Washington) identified Harlem expansion as a profit-making opportunity as well as an occasion to provide the city’s black population with much-needed housing, thereby satisfying both economic and social demands. Payton shrewdly advertised Harlem apartments in black newspapers, using the timely tropes of middle-class respectability and desirability to appeal to prospective tenants. In an environment typified by segregated and substandard housing, Harlem was marketed as a transformative space for people hungering for geographical, economic, political, and social change.4 Harlem’s experience at this time was not an anomaly. The nation’s African American population had been on the move since the late nineteenth century, a result of the post-Reconstruction erosion of civil rights, an increase in racial violence, and the promise of new and better economic opportunities than those in the rural South.5 By the early twentieth century, many urban areas, not just Harlem, were experiencing significant expansions of their African American populations. Prior to Harlem’s becoming available to black tenants, New York City’s black residents, like many in the burgeoning black belts in Chicago and Detroit, were forced to live in segregated, substandard housing. This was particularly the case in Manhattan’s Tenderloin and San Juan Hill areas, the former covering a disparate group of blocks between the Twenties and the Fifties on the West Side and the latter a more cohesive neighborhood between Sixtieth and Sixty-Fourth Streets and Tenth and Eleventh Avenues.6 Both neighborhoods were infamous for vice and other crime, conditions that were often detailed in the press. As early as 1900, for example, Harper’s Weekly described the Tenderloin district, “a Negro Neighborhood,” as a place in which “the virtuous and the vicious elbow each other in the closest kind of quarters.”7 Such urban living conditions, especially the tension between the transformative and the venal, began to be recognized by African American writers at this time. For example, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902), one of the earliest African American city novels, describes the new migrant’s first experience of New York, prefiguring by two decades the migrants’ tales associated with the Harlem Renaissance: “To the provincial coming to New York for the first time, ignorant and unknown, the city presents a notable mingling of the qualities of cheeriness and gloom. If he have any eye at all for the beautiful, he cannot help experiencing a thrill as he crosses the ferry over the river filled with plying craft and catches the first sight of the spires and buildings of New York. If he have the right stuff in him, a something will take possession of him that will grip him again every time he returns to the scene and will make him long and hunger for the place when he is away from it.”8 In this description Dunbar uses visual imagery to capture the almost corporeal effect of the

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modern, urban experience, along with the very contradictions presented by the city for African American migrants. Harlem may not have been an anomaly, but unlike the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill, its housing stock was of unique quality. Harlem’s “fundamental advantage,” according to James Weldon Johnson, was that it provided residents with “better, cleaner, more modern, more airy, more sunny houses than they ever lived in before.”9 Many of the community’s leading citizens and churches began to perceive the neighborhood’s potential for self- and community improvement and subsequently began moving to the area. Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church, for instance, transferred its substantial property holdings from downtown to 134th and 135th Streets by 1911, thus motivating its congregation to make a similar move, and anchoring the growth of the neighborhood’s God-fearing, presumably upright citizenship.10 This movement was buoyed further by the increased migration of “many of the city’s most prominent Negroes,” resulting in a neighborhood that included a number of the religious, civic, and business leaders of city’s African American community.11 Nevertheless, Harlem was already more expensive than other sections of the city, and, once its mostly white landlords realized they could charge their black tenants even higher rents, the cost of living skyrocketed. This situation forced many of the residents with lesser means to take in lodgers, diluting the population base from relatively stable single-family units into a dispersed, often more precarious economic and social structure. This, coupled with continued immigration from other parts of the city, surrounding states, southern states, and the West Indies (particularly in the late 1910s), complicated the notions of genteel urban living and constructed a “clear distinction . . . between the ‘civilized’ blacks worthy of Harlem and the self-destructive riffraff who were not.”12 Such tensions—between Harlem as a sparkling city on a hill versus the Harlem of overcrowding, poverty, and crime—thus were already well established prior to the area’s becoming the Mecca for Negroes. Indeed, they fueled attitudes about the neighborhood throughout the twentieth century—through the economic downturns of the 1930s, ’50s, and ’70s—and continue in the controversies over the most recent wave of development and migration to the area. The following discussion, therefore, considers the ways in which these contradictions have influenced our understanding of Harlem over time, along with the role of photography and cinema in the imaginative and visual construction of such a vexed and complex promised land.

“A New Negro for a New Century”: African American Film and Photography in the Twentieth Century In its study of African American film and photography, this book largely focuses on the years following World War II. Yet, just as Harlem became an African

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American neighborhood earlier than is often discussed, the political and aesthetic parameters of African American culture were established in the decades preceding the war. In order to understand Harlem in its various iterations in film and photography, therefore, we must return briefly to the late nineteenth century to mine the links between the construction of African American identity and visual representation. For example, whereas the term “New Negro” is most often associated with Alain Locke’s “The New Negro” (1925), in which he identified a new generation of African Americans, “keenly responsive as an augury of a new democracy in American culture,”13 its first usage is much older. Indeed, in an 1895 editorial in the Cleveland Gazette, the phrase was used to describe “a class of colored people . . . who have arisen since the war, with education, refinement, and money” and who “demanded that their rights as citizens be vouchsafed by law.”14 This would be the first time, argues Henry Louis Gates Jr., that the appellation was used as a self-conscious “sign of a new racial self.”15 The notion of a new self—and the ability to define and construct what that might be—was soon marshaled as a political position, most notably by Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier Williams, and N. B. Wood in A New Negro for a New Century, a collection of essays, excerpts from scholarly and journalistic sources, and photographic portraits of leading political and cultural figures (including Washington, his wife, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chestnutt, and Frederick Douglass) published in 1900. With the editors’ use of photographic portraiture to provide faces to leaders of the race, the New Negro morphed from written concept to visual trope. That same year, W.E.B. Du Bois expanded the practice of providing visual examples of the New Negro in the portraits of Atlanta’s black elite that he commissioned for the Paris Exposition. From these early beginnings, photography continued to play a central role in presenting the New Negro to the public by providing visual examples of African American progress, equality, and citizenship. Although this link between photography and identity serves as the foundation for the early chapters of this book, it continues as a presence throughout the text, forming my understanding of the ways in which Harlem has been self-consciously constructed and reconstructed as the location of African American self-identity and belonging over time, even when achievement gave way to more dystopian renderings of the neighborhood in the late 1930s through the ’70s. Most recently, and as my concluding discussion of Alice Attie’s Harlem photography suggests, the connections between African American visual culture and citizenship still pertain to our understanding of the place of Harlem in American history. The same year that the Cleveland Gazette editorial was published, American audiences watched the first projected motion pictures, the technology ushering in new forms of entertainment for the masses. Yet even though New Negro discourses were concerned with “reconstructing” the African American image

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for a new century, they tended, at least initially, to either reject or ignore the cinema as a possible medium for doing so.16 Indeed, at nearly the same time that the cinema was establishing itself as more than just a novelty, black elites chose print journalism, literature, painting, and photography as their preferred representational modes. The photographs accompanying A New Negro for a New Century and Du Bois’s Paris Exposition portraits, for example, were just two in a number of efforts to represent the New Negro; others included the “type” lithographs of John H. Adams, which appeared in the pages of Voice of the Negro and the Crisis among other periodicals, and the genre painting of Henry Ossawa Tanner. Ironically, these embodiments of a modern African American populace were often influenced by Victorian aesthetics; for example, the photographic portraits in particular were formally composed, with subjects enrobed and surrounded by the iconography of middle-class comfort. Yet and still, they attempted to present black subjects as realistically as possible. Although cinema inherited photography’s assumed links to veracity (through the seemingly objective process of mechanical reproduction), its roots in working-class, popular entertainments held another, more troubling legacy for black elites. By the time the first shorts were shown to audiences in New York and elsewhere, American film was borrowing abundantly from wellestablished amusements, especially vaudeville theater and carnival sideshows, which themselves exploited plantation literature, blackface minstrelsy, cartoons from newspapers and magazines, and a whole host of other demeaning visual tropes. According to Jacqueline Stewart, for example, an “element of foreknowledge—the assumed audience familiarity with particular kinds of narratives, character types, and (theatrical) modes of presentation—operate[d] strongly in early cinema’s racial and ethnic representations.”17 The earliest titles featuring African American actors, such as The Pickaninny Dance—From the “Passing Show” (Edison, 1894), suggest a literal connection to the vaudeville stage. Others, for example, The Chicken Thief (American Mutoscope, 1904), relied on well-honed stories of African American miscreance for popular appeal. As this suggests, the cinema drew from the very same aesthetic and cultural forms that the elite were working to dispel elsewhere through painting, drawing, and photography. In addition to demeaning content, the cinema added another complication to the problems surfacing in the nation’s burgeoning African American urban neighborhoods. The black bourgeoisie, like the middle classes more generally, were distressed by the rowdy behavior exhibited by the working-class audiences that frequented urban nickelodeons and movie houses, and they “(like their white counterparts) [began] to condemn cheap amusements such as the movies.”18 Such a lack of decorum among their less sophisticated brethren undermined the attempts of race leaders to prove African American equality through the performance of proper, moral comportment. Despite this, the

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cinema was viewed by some as possessing the potential to contribute to the progress of the race. As early as 1910, for example, Harlem’s Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., recognizing film’s nascent use for education and uplift, argued that the moving picture only needed to be “purified” of its more debased (popular) content rather than avoided altogether. Lester Walton, theater critic of the New York Age, also praised the cinema’s potential, and he (along with others) supported the business opportunities it presented for black entrepreneurs.19 Film, in short, had potential as a tool in the construction of the New Negro. But the parameters of cinematic content and form remained fraught. For the elite, who themselves were following more general reformist thinking, film should educate and lift up the masses. The masses, on the other hand, preferred comedy and other genres drawn from popular culture. In what ways then would such aesthetic tensions between uplift and entertainment converge in Harlem?

African American City Film: Making Harlem Move Like Harlem’s history as an African American community, African American film has a complex relationship to American culture more generally. During the Jim Crow years, for example, African American businessmen and artists with a desire to make films were virtually excluded from the industry, both in its earlier, more informal East Coast iterations and in its later, codified studio configuration on the West Coast. Despite exclusion from the more established end of the film business, a number of African American entrepreneurs entered the field during the 1910s. William Foster, for example, founded the Foster Photoplay Company of Chicago in 1910. The company released a couple of short films, including The Railroad Porter (1913), a slapstick comedy about a cuckolded Pullman porter. Even though Foster used vaudeville performers and scenarios, he was aware of the medium’s potential for message making and argued that film could be used to “offset so many insults to the race.”20 Not long after, white investors founded the Afro-American Film Company in New York City and hired African American businessman Hunter C. Haynes as head of production. Like Foster, Afro-American produced short comedies featuring popular black vaudevillians. Unlike the Foster films, however, which received relatively positive reviews, Afro-American’s films were more controversial and “black theatre owners and managers refused to book [them] because they contained many of the same derogatory racial-stereotype characterizations of blacks in films released by the major companies.”21 Haynes formed his own company in 1914 and produced a comedy and a newsreel, the latter of which was praised as “by far the most meritorious picture of its kind ever thrown upon the screen” by the New York Age.22 The behavior of filmmakers, theater owners, and critics alike suggests that from very early on, African American spectators were critically engaged with their on-screen representation.

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The responses to Foster’s and Haynes’s films, moreover, illustrate the nascent tensions between fiction and nonfiction forms already evident in the cinematic treatment of African American subject matter, a tension founded in film’s photographic base and the latter’s assumed one-to-one relationship to reality. Portrait photographers, inadvertently providing a representational and ideological link between still and moving images, founded many early film companies. To a certain extent these companies functioned in a similar manner as local photographers; they documented important events, personalities, and groups for an audience keen to identify with images of black progress (especially if such content included their own visages). More public than the portraiture preferred by Washington and Du Bois—which tended to be exchanged among family and friends—the newsreels presented African American accomplishment to a wide, potentially mixed-race, audience. They were, in short, a modern way to represent a modern people. Fiction film had a more vexed reception, especially among the black bourgeoisie. Like the Edison and American Mutoscope and Biograph Companies, early African American filmmakers recognized the appeal of popular subject matter because it was a quick and easy way to attract audiences and, potentially, to make a profit. Other filmmakers followed Foster’s lead, and over the next decade a number of race film companies were established, including the Norman Film Manufacturing Company (1912), the Lincoln Motion Picture Company (1916), and the Micheaux Book and Motion Picture Company (1918). The companies made films for African American audiences that starred black performers and featured topical narratives. Although the companies were business enterprises first, many were committed to uplift politics.23 Unlike Foster, who saw the compatibility between uplift and comedy, most race film companies from the late 1910s and early 1920s preferred melodrama, the form proving a perfect match for the film’s social intentions. Indeed, the melodrama, like the newsreel, presented African American achievement by offering morality tales featuring models of Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth” working, studying, and achieving. The films were intended to instruct their urban audiences—or their country cousins—on how to be New Negroes in the new century. The preference for melodrama among race film companies did not ebb until the early 1930s with the coming of sound technologies, a development that led to the demise of many African American filmmaking concerns. In order to remain competitive, companies (the few remaining and those that had been recently established) were forced to actively engage with Hollywood films, which looked and sounded better and which, with the transition to sound, had begun featuring African American performers (by pulling black talent and subjects from the stage). By the mid-1930s, race film companies were releasing titles in a number of popular genres, including westerns, musicals, and the gangster/crime film in an attempt to retain their slim box office. While they

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incorporated elements of recognizable genres, race films from this time nevertheless adapted many of the formulas for their African American audiences. We can see this, for example, in the group of gangster films released from the mid-1930s through the ’40s that starred Ralph Cooper. Many conformed to basic generic elements—charting the rise and fall of a gangster figure along with the sights and sounds of the city. At the same time, they signified a modern African American subjectivity; for example, the title Dark Manhattan (Harry L. Fraser and Ralph Cooper, 1937) places its narrative in Harlem, and its story of numbers runners addresses an African American audience that would have recognized the specifics of black organized crime. The shift to popular genres fueled the discord already influencing African American aesthetics and politics at the time. For many, the genre films diluted the race film’s primary purpose of education and uplift by offering narratives that were considered to be blackface versions of Hollywood films. Indeed, the films did not appear to embody the preferred aesthetic forms of the black elite. They were linked too closely with popular culture—with entertainment—rather than with the conventions of social protest and change, of which the melodrama and newsreel were the prime cinematic examples. Nevertheless, genre films had the potential to mimic, adapt, and deform Hollywood conventions for various ends, including uplift. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that later African American filmmakers returned to genre, especially the gangster film, as a means of exploring African American politics and culture through the guise of entertainment. While Harlem has been the setting for a variety of genres over the decades, it has been most closely linked to the crime film, particularly its gangster variations. As such, gangster and crime films set in the neighborhood provide a compelling opportunity to explore a number of the issues regarding the construction of African American identity, aesthetics, and politics in more detail, and they are the primary focus of this book for a variety of reasons. First, their setting in the symbolic center of African American life helps us to consider what it means to be a Harlemite—and by extension, an American—at various moments in history. Their narratives may be fictional; nonetheless, the films often reference real people and places, and their stories of economic and personal transformation become more plausible in a setting already associated with change and promise. Second, the films capture Harlem—sometimes its actual spaces and always its symbolic resonance—at different moments in its history, and the styles used to do so, from the more conventional narrative form of the 1930s to the self-conscious treatment of subject and setting in the 1970s and ’90s to recent period pieces set in the neighborhood, reveals as much about global cinematic trends as it does African American film aesthetics. Finally, Harlem crime films demand that spectators reconsider the tropes of criminality and venality historically attached to black cityspaces by scholars and politicians,

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both black and white. Indeed, their engagement with race, representation, and space requires that we return to the questions of citizenship and belonging that preoccupied leaders like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois at the beginning of the twentieth century. In short, they posit that making it in Harlem is a prerequisite for making it in America. While the majority of texts that I consider are Harlem crime films, this discussion is equally committed to considering the role of photography in constructions of the neighborhood in the popular imagination. As suggested above, my discussion starts with early-twentieth-century portraiture as a means of uncovering the use and meaning of the photographic image in New Negro politics and aesthetics. From early on, the photograph, like film, was used to allay demeaning stereotypes of black people inherited from other media and scientific sources. It was not long, however, before photographers took to the streets, using the evidentiary power of the photograph to document the highs and lows of Harlem life—from protest marches to returning soldiers, everyday people to celebrities—for a variety of audiences and purposes, often refracting broader societal questions about the role of the city in African American and American life. Most recently, photography has served a dual purpose: on the one hand, it has documented a changing cityscape in the face of transformative growth and development in the neighborhood. On the other hand, it has memorialized a symbolic Harlem of the past as a form of mourning for what is gone. Each iteration, I argue, connects to film, for the combination of the two art forms—perhaps even more than literature—has provided us with a sustaining image of Harlem as the promised land.

Numbers Runners and Juvenile Delinquents: Mapping the Promised Land Making a Promised Land focuses on four moments in the history of Harlem crime films: one of the first appearances of black urban criminality in early silent cinema, a selection of gangster films made by race film producers in the 1930s and ’40s, a brief reemergence of the formula during the blaxploitation boom of the 1970s, and revisionist texts from the past two decades. It also considers one of the genre’s subcycles, the juvenile delinquency film, which appeared midcentury and focused on black male youth who were either petty criminals or gang members. These different occurrences of the black crime film—from numbers runners to juvenile delinquents and contemporary gangstas—offer rich case studies for my examination of urbanization, representation, and popular culture because, from its very beginnings, the gangster film was concerned with exploring the changing face of American democracy, especially through the rubrics of ethnicity and class. Its narratives of ethnic outsiders climbing the ladder of economic, if not social, success through the alternative

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economies of bootlegging, gambling, and bribery suggested, in an albeit twisted manner, that the American promise of economic prosperity was available to all, despite birthright or upbringing. Furthermore, gangster films were morality tales and therefore amenable to messages of uplift and reform, a facet of the genre that continues in its latest variations. Audiences may have reveled in the collective fantasy of the gangster’s triumph, but it was just as commonly accepted that he would either die or be imprisoned by the end. The two conclusions weren’t, and still aren’t, incompatible. Chapter 1, “African American Aesthetics and the City: Picturing the Black Bourgeoisie in New York,” lays the groundwork for the links between urbanization, uplift ideologies, and aesthetics that flow throughout Making a Promised Land. It provides a history of turn-of-the-century urbanization in general—and Harlem in particular—and draws connections between the expansion of African American cityspaces and the development of a modern African American politics. Through the introduction of the uplift ideologies of intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, this chapter charts the ways in which the New Negro morphed from a concept into a visual marker in African American painting, printmaking, and photography. It argues that images, particularly photographic portraits, of the black bourgeoisie connoted education, ambition, and success for a larger audience. Indeed, such representations of the New Negro were recruited to assert African American equality more broadly, and thus suggest that politics went hand-in-hand with aesthetics in the early twentieth century. Chapter 1 also traces the early appearance of Harlem in African American arts. While primarily focused on photography and film, my discussion makes a brief detour here to examine one of the first examples of an African American city novel, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902). The purpose for this is twofold: first, although the novel is not set in Harlem, it nevertheless charts the experiences of southern migrants in New York City, a theme that became increasingly common in African American literature and film over the next thirty years. In particular, the novel illustrates the promises and pitfalls of city life, the former in the form of the economic and social mobility and the latter through a detailing of the city’s temptations (characterized by drinking, gambling, and popular amusements like vaudeville shows). Second, Dunbar’s novel, like most of the author’s work, illustrates the political-aesthetic tensions faced by African American artists who were forced to choose between vernacular or folk forms and the more conventional models preferred by the black bourgeoisie. Such antagonisms were imported into African American attitudes about film, I argue, and they continue to have a significant effect on assumptions about cinematic form and content. The above serves as a precursor to a discussion of the place of the cinema in such an exciting and fraught moment in African American history. As I’ve suggested here, the first African American film companies were not established

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until the early 1910s, yet absence behind the camera did not preclude a presence on screen. “African American Aesthetics and the City” argues that many early examples of African Americans on film were drawn from vaudeville and blackface minstrelsy, which built on the demeaning stereotypes already present in literature, the popular press, and music. While many of these forms linked black bodies to the rural South, a more urban black presence soon appeared in early film. My discussion in chapter 1 therefore begins and ends with an analysis of Fights of Nations, a 1907 short film by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. The film is a collection of vignettes of immigrants of various ethnicities, all of whom are enfolded into the encompassing embrace of American democracy in the concluding scene. Of particular interest is a section about African Americans in New York City. Set in a drinking establishment, it features various examples of black venality, violence, and immorality. In effect, it provides viewers with an early example of black urban criminality, a theme that continues to influence cinematic representations of African American city life. Moreover, the section connects to other urban crime films of the time, which also featured urban immigrants (primarily Italians) engaged in various illegal behaviors. Undeniably, films such as Fights of Nations illustrate the struggle to define nationhood at a moment when its racial, economic, and social contours were in a state of flux. Chapter 2, “Heaven and Hell in Harlem: Urban Aesthetics for a Renaissance People,” develops the theoretical and aesthetic threads introduced in the preceding chapter, particularly the connections between urbanization, politics, and aesthetics. It provides an overview of Harlem’s expansion as an African American community in the 1920s, and its growing recognition as one of the centers—if not the center—of African American politics and culture of the time. It also details the relationship of New Negro ideologies to the attempt to outline a working model of African American aesthetics for an increasingly modern, urban, and media savvy populace. By focusing on the tensions between W.E.B. Du Bois’s and Alain Locke’s evolving definitions of African American art as either propaganda (the desire for uplift and education) or art (the desire for beauty), this chapter lays the groundwork for the cinema’s vexed relationship to black culture during the years associated with the Harlem Renaissance, when some arts (literature, painting, sculpture) were flourishing. Such concerns provide the background for the chapter’s main focus, a group of early sound-era gangster films set in Harlem. “Heaven and Hell in Harlem” provides a detailed history of the race film industry, a group of blackowned or mixed-race film companies that produced films featuring black characters in all-black worlds (the latter with few exceptions). During the late 1930s and early ’40s, for example, race film companies produced a number of gangster films, incorporating many of the conventions of the genre and adapting others for an African American spectatorship. I am most interested in

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films set in Harlem—such as Harlem Is Heaven (Irwin Franklyn, 1932), Dark Manhattan, and Moon over Harlem (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1939)—because they illustrate the struggle to define African American modern life in what had become the most recognizable black urban community in the nation. The films also illuminate the tensions affecting African American aesthetics at the time, the preferred cultural forms of the black elite, who linked film negatively to popular culture and therefore chose the more acceptable arts of literature, painting, and photography to represent black life. Such highbrow aesthetics were set in opposition to more popular entertainments, which were often linked to vernacular or folk art forms. The black gangster films of the interwar years straddled an interesting line between the popular and something else. They used many familiar elements of the genre, including urban locations, plots charting the rise and fall of the criminal protagonist, and narratives of economic and social mobility. But they adapted many other conventions and, in the process, presented narratives geared to their black urban audiences, who themselves were looking for stories featuring modern African American characters and plots that reflected their everyday reality. The films were resolutely modern; they spoke to their audience’s immediate circumstances through setting, costume, sound (for example, many included cabaret performers), and subject matter, much like the Harlem literature from the time. Moreover, their Harlem setting signified something more—its reputation as a promised land suggested that the film’s narratives of mobility could be achieved on its streets. In short, black gangster films utilized many of the conventions of the genre, but they also articulated discourses of community and enterprise that were specific to uplift ideology. Chapter 3, “Delinquents in the Making: Harlem’s Representational Turn toward ‘Marketable Shock,’” takes a different tack from the previous chapters while still exploring African American urban politics and aesthetics through cinematic narratives of black criminality. It provides a genealogy of the figure of the young black criminal—more juvenile delinquent or gang member than gangster—from his visual debut in early photojournalism and photo-texts from the 1930s and ’40s through his appearance in two rare films made in Harlem during the mid-twentieth century, The Quiet One (Sidney Meyers, 1948) and The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, 1963). As early as 1939, for example, black urban spaces like Harlem had begun to be identified as “problems” by mass-market publications like Fortune, Life, and Look magazines. Using many of the aesthetics first established in Depression-era photo-texts like You Have Seen Their Faces (Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell, 1937) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Walker Evans and James Agee, 1941), photo magazines presented the world in documentary form—where text functioned as a voice-over for still images—to an interested and receptive public. Such features were supplemented by book-length photo-essays that often paired the writing of authors

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like Richard Wright or James Baldwin with still photography drawn from a variety of sources. The effect of such image-text collaborations was to document black life, and photographs served as evidentiary support for sociological tracts. Often, as with the magazines, the focus was African American urban spaces like Harlem, which Fortune described in 1939 as “the cosmopolis of the Negro world . . . in fact, the only Negro cosmopolis.”24 Films focusing on similar subject matter soon joined the photo-text presentations of black urban criminality. This chapter argues that like the photo-texts, The Quiet One and The Cool World take a similar view of black youth in the city, arguing that their young protagonists are the products of environments marked by poverty, criminality, and family dysfunction. By incorporating the conventions of documentary filmmaking along with the realist aesthetics of international cinema movements of the time—Italian Neorealism in the case of the former, and cinéma vérité, the nouvelle vague, and New American Cinema in the case of the latter—both films present black juvenile delinquents as the problematic products of the nation’s troubled urban spaces. Indeed, they illustrate the influence of broader political and academic theories in circulation regarding the effects of urban environments on the poor and uneducated. During the fifteen years between the release of The Quiet One and The Cool World, there was very little African American film production. By the mid-1940s, the race film industry had virtually disappeared, the result of desegregation legislation and Hollywood’s incrementally increased employment of African American actors and technical personal. Like race films, The Quiet One and The Cool World were independent productions, made with very low budgets and limited distribution. Unlike the race films, however, both were made by white directors and mostly white personnel, many of whom were linked, like Helen Levitt and James Agee on The Quite One and Shirley Clarke on The Cool World, to liberal politics and social causes (Carl Lee, an African American actor, also played a major role in the latter film). Moreover, the films did not conform to well-established industry conventions. Their combination of nonfiction techniques with both conventional and more experimental fiction aesthetics put them in a different category of film; one that had not been attempted by race film companies, which tended to make more conventional narrative films and newsreels. This, combined with their exhibition histories, including screenings at international film festivals and art houses, suggests that, unlike the gangster films, they may not have been intended for African American audiences. Even so, they remained committed to the reformist causes of their print predecessors. Chapter 3 thus interrogates the role of The Quiet One and The Cool World in presenting African American cityspaces to more general audiences. My discussion considers three elements. First, both films present contemporary African American urban life to the public at a time when Harlem’s reputation as a

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promised land had been increasingly compromised by a plethora of social and economic hardships experienced by its black residents since the Depression years. Second, the films not only suggest that Harlem—and the black city in general—is a problem, but their presentation of juvenile delinquents, gang members, or more hardened criminals implies that young black men are the problem. Through such figures the films continued the primary sociological and political approach to black urban subject matter with which audiences would have been familiar, one that presented the city through the tropes of criminality, venality, and abjection. The promised land of the 1920s had disappeared, and Harlem went from being celebrated to maligned in academic and popular writing. In such a space, possibility for change was truncated and the more transformative elements of the neighborhood disappeared. Chapter 4, “Gangster’s Paradise: Drugs and Crime in Harlem, from Blaxploitation to New Jack Cinema,” returns us to films by African American filmmakers intended for black—and often more general—audiences. It focuses on two different film movements, blaxploitation film from the 1970s and a more recent wave of African American filmmaking from the early ’90s, with a particular focus on Black Caesar (Larry Cohen, 1973), Jungle Fever (Spike Lee, 1991), and New Jack City (Mario Van Peebles, 1991). While the films were made at different moments in African American film history and are separated by almost twenty years, they share a number of commonalities, including African American personnel, industry backing, contemporary urban settings, and a return to genre conventions. Blaxploitation, or black action films, for example, were made on small budgets and featured empowered black male protagonists who fought white power structures, often embodied by the police, politicians, or organized crime. They focused on black antiheroes of all sorts, including drug dealers, pimps, and gangsters (who were often involved with drugs among other rackets). While commonly considered a genre, blaxploitation was actually a hybrid, composed of a number of genres, including the detective film, the vampire film, and, as suggested above, the gangster film. “Gangster’s Paradise” opens with a discussion of Black Caesar as a film that combines blaxploitation and gangster film conventions and constructs a new black gangster figure. From the former, the film borrows blaxploitation’s empowered antihero, location shooting, and a self-consciousness of film style. The film’s main character is a daring Harlemite who shows no fear when facing his white foes, whether they are Italian organized crime members or the NYPD. From the gangster film, Black Caesar borrows a protagonist who works his way up the ranks of organized crime only to be punished for his greed and hubris. It is in the film’s shifts from gangster conventions—both those of the black gangster films from the 1930s and of Hollywood films—that, I argue, Black Caesar stages a complex examination of the role of the black hero in a Harlem decimated by crime, poverty, and decay.

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After a brief discussion of African American city films from the 1980s, the second half of this chapter focuses on two examples of more recent Harlem films, Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever and Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City, both of which are set, like Black Caesar, in a Harlem setting contemporary with their production. The films are very different—with Jungle Fever a mixed-race romance and New Jack City a revisionist gangster film—and yet they both offer compelling illustrations of the ways in which the interconnected histories of Harlem and African American representation began to change once again. Lee’s film is neither a gangster nor a crime film, however; its story of an ill-fated affair between an African American striver from Harlem and a working-class Italian American woman from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, says more about Harlem’s status in the early 1990s than it does about the history of miscegenation. The film reference’s to Harlem’s past, especially its more positive aspects as symbolized by its middle-class characters and Striver’s Row setting, are used as means of exploring its present—one facing the dual and dueling forces of nascent gentrification and crack cocaine. By focusing on two Harlem locations, the main character’s residence on Harlem’s Striver’s Row and the “Taj Mahal,” a local crack house, I argue that Jungle Fever engages in a complex exploration of the roles and responsibilities of the black bourgeoisie in the late twentieth century. Indeed, Jungle Fever may be a modern-day uplift melodrama. While also concerned with present-day Harlem, New Jack City adopts a different attitude toward its subject. The film returns us to the gangster genre to explore the crack epidemic that decimated African American communities like Harlem in the late 1980s and early ’90s. By adapting the conventions of both the classical gangster film and its later blaxploitation variant, New Jack City introduced a different Harlem face to audiences, the “gangsta,” a young, black criminal (part gangster, part juvenile delinquent) willing to do anything for money. In its presentation of a new form of black male criminal the film is a compelling amalgamation of various moments in film history—and its references are more focused on the history of the genre than the history of the neighborhood—while also self-consciously referencing a larger political and social context. Through a postmodern pastiche that includes references to classic and revisionist gangster films, most notably Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), New Jack City reminds us of the genre’s explorations of economic success and access to the American Dream. And yet, the gangster cares nothing for his community, and in this New Jack City returns us to the tropes of urbanization, community responsibility, and belonging that continues to impact the way in which Harlem is envisioned on film. Chapter 5, “Echoes of a Renaissance: Harlem’s Nostalgic Turn” explores the ways in which contemporary photography and films have constructed a particularly nostalgic attitude toward Harlem at a time of renewed change in the neighborhood. It opens with a brief discussion of the “Harlemworld: Metropolis

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as Metaphor” show organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003. By focusing on two elements of the show catalogue, a discussion of Pierre Nora’s concept of les lieux de memoire (sites of memory), and a contemporary photograph by Barron Claiborne that quotes James VanDerZee’s work, I suggest that iconic images of Harlem from the 1920s and ’30s have left an indelible mark on present-day

written

and

visual

representations

of

the

neighborhood.

Furthermore, I argue, such nostalgic reconstructions of a Renaissance-era Harlem function in complex ways at a moment when the neighborhood has been experiencing a substantial wave of development that is threatening its very status as an African American community. Such mourning makes sense, given reports suggesting that Harlem’s black population has been disappearing from the neighborhood, the result of gentrification and urban renewal. But is this nostalgia also an indication of the ways in which Harlem has become an empty symbol, nothing more than an icon of the past as a form of branding in the present? In such a context, how does Harlem resonate for audiences that may have little real connection to the neighborhood and yet continue to believe in its significance as an African American community? The remainder of the chapter shifts from still to moving images to explore the ways in which nostalgia functions in three history films set in Harlem, Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992), Hoodlum (Bill Duke, 1997), and American Gangster (Ridley Scott, 2007). Each film differs in subject and historical time period, yet all borrow heavily from the gangster film to address a contemporary context of development and change. Malcolm X is the least likely to appear in a discussion of gangster films—it’s widely considered to be a biopic—and yet at least a third of the film’s running time is set in Harlem of the early 1940s, a time when Malcolm (still Malcolm Little at this point) was a small-time criminal involved in a variety of illegal activities, from selling drugs to running numbers. Through a comparison of this section to the relevant portions of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I suggest that Lee’s film fetishizes this moment in Malcolm’s—and Harlem’s—history. Indeed, the early sections of Malcolm X celebrate a Harlem of the past as well as the film forms (the gangster film, the musical) so often used to convey its sights and sounds to appreciative audiences. The two remaining titles, Hoodlum and American Gangster, are inarguably gangster films, and their revisions and adaptations of generic conventions reveal much about contemporary attitudes toward Harlem, both past and present. Hoodlum, for example, is set during the 1930s, the era of the classic gangster film, and in many ways it borrows from the earlier films (at least the Hollywood variants) in story and style to explore the past through a rubric that refracts contemporary political and social discourses. The film returns us to where we began in our discussion of the black gangster in chapter 2, the numbers racket of the early 1930s, and it does so by concentrating on an actual crime figure, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. With this focus, the film revisits the heyday of both

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the black gangster and the neighborhood as a whole. And yet, rather than presenting the rise and fall of a gangster hero, Hoodlum rewrites Bumpy Johnson’s legacy, presenting him as a Robin Hood figure who provided the needy residents of Depression-struck Harlem with food and money. Such revisionism cannot be linked solely to a strain of postmodernism running throughout contemporary American film at this time, but must be understood, to quote Fredric Jameson in a different context, as a means of gratifying “a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artefacts through once again.”25 This impulse makes sense in light of larger political, economic, social, and aesthetic forces affecting Harlem, in which elements of black America’s symbolic center were disappearing, a result of changes brought about by economic development. In story, setting, and time frame, therefore, Hoodlum exhibits a nostalgia for a bygone Harlem, one frozen into a mythological “renaissance” moment when the neighborhood held promise and even gangsters were community-minded. American Gangster (2007), on the other hand, is set in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the time of Black Caesar. Like Hoodlum, the film is based on the life of an actual Harlem gangster named Frank Lucas. Lucas was a notorious heroin dealer who broke the hold of Italian organized crime on the neighborhood by outsourcing his suppliers to Southeast Asia. Like Hoodlum’s rendition of Bumpy Johnson, American Gangster presents Lucas as a hero. Unlike the earlier film, however, Lucas’s status is based less on his position as a gangster and more on his decision to expand his operation globally, an action that references the most recent development in Harlem (which is fueled by international interests) as much as it does any of Lucas’s actual business decisions. As this suggests, the film’s nostalgia is more complex than it first appears—it is not a celebration of the blaxploitation film, for example—because its discourse on economic independence focuses on one of the main tropes of the gangster film. Such concerns connect us to the larger issues of African American economic selfdetermination and citizenship that run throughout Making a Promised Land. Lucas’s activities define him, as the title suggests, as an American as much as he is a gangster. Ironically, he has attained full citizenship by practicing a very American form of laissez-faire capitalism. In short, Frank Lucas just might be the New Negro for this new century. “Making and Remaking a Promised Land: Harlem’s Continuing Revisions” returns us almost to where we began this discussion. It offers a brief exegesis on a series of photographs taken by artist Alice Attie that appeared in a 2003 photo-text called Harlem on the Verge. The images focus on a time of change in Harlem and, by association, the nation’s African American population. More than one hundred years after W.E.B. Du Bois’s Paris Exposition photographs, we still see photography marshaled in an effort to define a time, place, and people. For Attie, the photographs were intended to function in the tradition of Walter

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Benjamin’s conception of the “aura,” as a form of “historical mourning.”26 While the images capture Harlem’s beauty and decay, along with its wonderful and wonderfully frustrating idiosyncrasies, they nonetheless rely on a photographic veracity, an almost God-like evidentiary ability to record reality. And in this way, they remind us that Harlem may be in a state of flux (or on the verge of something), but its symbolism, particularly that manufactured by film and photography, remains fundamentally unchanged. In all, Making a Promised Land examines the interconnected concerns of African American representation and urban life recorded in still and moving images over the past century. Formerly, Harlem was the place within which African American identity was authored—the home of the New Negro for a New Century—as exemplified by the portraits included in texts by Booker T. Washington and Du Bois and the many newspapers and magazines geared toward a black middle-class readership. Over time, the neighborhood signified different things for African Americans. During the early years of the twentieth century to the Harlem Renaissance 1920s, it was a promised land. From the Depression years to the 1970s, it was a space symbolizing all that was wrong with African American urban life. Since the early 1990s, Harlem has undergone another revision as a wave of outside development has changed the neighborhood’s look and demographics. As young professionals and families of all races and ethnicities replace its African American population, the neighborhood is experiencing another crisis of definition, and many photographers and filmmakers are struggling to outline its new contours. This book suggests that each of these changes have been detailed visually in film and photography over the years. Whether they date from the early twentieth or twenty-first century, such images document and dialogue with the tropes of citizenship and progress that have been central to African American life. And the fact that they do so in a variety of shapes, styles, and genres makes the journey through Harlem as compelling as it is exciting. Indeed, Harlem is practically a development of the past decade, but the story behind it goes back a long way.

1 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

African American Aesthetics and the City Picturing the Black Bourgeoisie in New York

They had heard of New York as a place vague and far away, a city that, like Heaven, to them had existed by faith alone. All the days of their lives they had heard of it, and it seemed to them the center of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom of the world. —Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods

The 1907 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s short film Fights of Nations includes one of the earliest cinematic depictions of African American life in New York City. Introduced with an intertitle reading, “Sunny Africa, Eighth Avenue, New York,” the film’s presentation of black urbanity features the clientele of a New York City cabaret who drink, cakewalk, and fight. Despite this, the film is not about Harlem or any other neighborhood in particular; nor is it about African American life more generally. Instead, Fights of Nations narrates a story of American origins; it presents a collection of vignettes of international strife and American refuge. Together they support—perhaps even write—a developing mythology in which the young nation is presented as the world’s haven, a peaceful promised land for the oppressed. The film provides examples of Spanish, Mexican, Jewish, Scottish, and Irish people experiencing (often self-inflicted) violence and strife in their home countries, and it concludes by gathering different characters, some from the previous stories, in a space that is introduced via intertitle as “America, the Land of the Free.” The nation’s mythic significance is suggested through the presence of an American eagle above a collection of national flags, and an American Indian woman kneeling before them. The film ends with a shot of Uncle Sam entering the scene, as if suggesting that disparate people can find a home within the nation’s avuncular embrace. 20

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FIGURE 1. “America, the Land of the Free,” in Fights of Nations (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1907).

Though the film is a compelling early example of mythmaking in its construction of a nation marked by inclusion and tolerance, it is even more interesting for the sleight-of-hand it performs with its African American characters. Unlike the other stories, which are set in either another country (“Mexico and Spain”) or an unspecified space (“Sons of the Ould Sod”), the film’s black characters are placed in a specific world: “Sunny Africa, Eighth Avenue, New York.” Furthermore, most of the other scenes are set in pseudoexterior locations (pseudo in that they are sets), while “Sunny Africa” is actually an interior cabaret space (still a set) with a narrative that relies on many of the generalizations about black people made popular in nineteenth-century minstrel and vaudeville performances (drinking, dancing, fighting). Such obsessive placement of the black characters is more striking when one takes into account that they are later excluded from the film’s concluding national mosaic, an absence that I will discuss in more detail later. This chapter begins with this example not to focus on the way in which the city appears in the “Sunny Africa” section of Fights of Nations but to suggest the highly complex and extremely fraught chain of significations generated by the presence of black bodies in early American film. The vignette is important in that it suggests that by the early twentieth century, New York City was

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already recognized as home to a large African American population. Moreover, the scene’s cabaret setting and minstrel show display a set of behaviors, including drinking and violence, that were already associated, from popular music, the stage, and early film, with urban blacks. Most important, the film’s self-conscious focus on defining nation suggests the contradictory position of black Americans in the United States at the time: on the one hand, we see an acknowledgment of an urban African American population, on the other hand (if we are to believe the film’s resolution), black people ultimately have no place in “America, the Land of the Free” at the beginning of a new century. The issues raised by the “Sunny Africa” section only scratch the surface of a much more complex set of political and social factors beginning to define African American life during the early twentieth century. For African Americans, the new century brought with it a desire for a redefinition of self, personhood, and citizenship. This was particularly the case with the educated elite, the “New Negroes,” who brought a distinct set of political concerns to bear on their attempts to construct an image of black life, one that was characterized by middle-class achievement, education, and culture. Furthermore, and Fights of Nations raises this issue less explicitly, the new century was characterized by larger questions of industrialization, migration, and urbanization that led to the growth of areas like New York City and Chicago, cities that soon became closely associated with African American life. For New Negroes bent on defining a black modernity, the new century was already awash with preexisting cultural forms extending back to the antebellum period: popular amusements such as minstrelsy and vaudeville, and the scientific uses of photography. What remains to be seen is the ways in which African American life, letters, and visual art would be influenced by, and redefine, such a legacy. This chapter focuses on the period between 1900 and 1910 and outlines the interconnections between contested definitions of, and attempts to represent, a modern, urban, African American identity. By examining examples from literature and visual arts, including painting, photography, and film, I will examine the ways in which aesthetics were marshaled for African American political causes, especially with regard to twentieth-century urbanization. Was there a hierarchy of acceptable aesthetics and art forms? How did African American intellectuals and thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, seek to incorporate arts such as painting, printmaking, and photography into modern black life? And what were the roles of vaudeville and minstrelsy in this new aesthetic formation if many New Negroes possessed more middle-class values about art? What would be the overall effects of these attempts at writing a black urban aesthetic on the relationship between the African American community and new popular entertainments like film? Finally, how does Harlem, the soonto-be “Mecca of the New Negro,” resonate with this attempt at cultural and political redefinition?

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The Provincial in New York: Urbanization and Uplift “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” When these words appeared in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, the writer was both looking back at African American political gains and losses since Emancipation and laying out a strategy for the next century.1 And while his assertion has continuing relevance for African Americans in the twenty-first century, what is less frequently discussed is the concluding portion of Du Bois’s sentence, which expresses political concerns that are even more complex than the borders implied by a color line: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”2 Du Bois is not merely calling out examples of racial tension, or rhetorically linking people of color in a global diaspora; rather his words foreground, perhaps unconsciously, the importance of space in the construction of race. For Du Bois, the problem of the twentieth century was racialized (and classed and gendered) spatial boundaries. If the problem is the “color line,” then how might Du Bois figure the “relations” between races that cross this divide? Du Bois’s struggle with defining African American life and culture during the early twentieth century was part of a broader political discussion focused on identifying the “place” of blacks in American life (in other words, on which side of the line blacks existed). During the latter half of the nineteenth century, for example, the nation’s black population experienced severe and often violent reversals of many of the rights and freedoms, such as suffrage, won during the early Reconstruction era. The repeal of such laws—legislation that had very little chance of enforcement or survival—was officially condoned in 1896 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. In effect, the ruling upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” railroad facilities, thereby legalizing an already de facto system of apartheid in the South more commonly known as Jim Crow. The year before, and perhaps to quell southern racial tensions, Booker T. Washington, head of Tuskegee Institute and the most influential African American political and cultural power broker in the nation, presented his infamous “Atlanta Compromise” in which he advocated black economic empowerment over efforts for civil and political equality. Washington’s suggestion that “In all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” effectively supported a system of black self-reliance built on segregated institutions devoted to agriculture, small industry, and domestic service.3 For Washington, the political and social health of the nation’s African American population rested on distinctly southern agrarian foundations and a political strategy of accommodation and self-help. In this framework, the best place for African Americans seemed to be a southern pastoral.

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Du Bois initially supported Washington, but he revised his ideas about the elder statesman by the time The Souls of Black Folk was published.4 The essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” is the author’s most direct critique of Washington in the collection. Du Bois respectfully takes his elder to task for what he believed was Washington’s compromise on black suffrage, political submission, and education. Crucially, he criticizes Washington for “shifting the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders,”5 rather than casting the responsibility for African American poverty and illiteracy onto the nation as a whole. Such a view was aligned with his sociological attempts to reconsider, or reconstruct, race as culturally—and economically—influenced rather than biologically determined. Furthermore, Washington’s construct of race relations implied that the nation’s black population existed outside of, or separate from, national concerns, an idea that Du Bois resisted (and one that underscores the spatial dynamics of race politics). Indeed, the younger man aligned the health of the nation with the prevailing social conditions in black communities, something he witnessed firsthand in his fieldwork in Philadelphia. Du Bois’s position on African American politics and culture influenced his shift away from Washington’s more accommodationist approach to race relations. He also placed great importance on a liberal arts rather than industrial education as a means of black improvement and empowerment. For Du Bois, African American progress was predicated on the “Talented Tenth,” an educated black elite that “would bring culture and progress to the race” and provide the needed professionals and teachers to lead and educate their less fortunate brethren.6 This combination of class, culture, and education had distinct meaning in the context of the urban milieu because, according to Du Bois, the city would become an important place in which “the Best of the race . . . may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the worst, in their own and other races.”7 Thus, while Du Bois was somewhat ambivalent about the role of urban, especially northern, centers in black life—he had lived in northern urban areas and witnessed their negative sides—he recognized their opportunities and perhaps even anticipated the increased race consciousness of many African American urbanites in the following decades. Many of the earliest African American migrants to Harlem were members of the civic, religious, and business elite, a microcosmic example of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth (and representative of similar demographic shifts occurring in other cities at this time). During the first decade of black settlement in Harlem, approximately 1905–1915, it became apparent that urban space was an important site for African American self-definition, particularly in the context of a rapidly industrializing, modernizing, and transforming nation. While the inmigration of blacks from surrounding, and increasingly southern, states was stiffening the economic competition between black and white workers in northern manufacturing centers, it also strained relations between blacks of

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different classes and backgrounds. To many northern African Americans, the new arrivals “from the South were too uncivilized to live alongside” those who considered themselves “more highly cultured and cosmopolitan.”8 The elite’s function was “to impose a sense of control and order on the overwhelming problems facing blacks in cities and elsewhere.”9 This response came from a sense of elitism and a fear that southern migrants would sully the gains made by the black bourgeoisie in assimilating into white urban society. How is this assimilationist discourse rendered? How is it rehearsed and sustained as an African American ideal? One of the key ways in which this was articulated was through the identification and construction of an urban aesthetics. Specifically, the defining of such aesthetics enabled African Americans to assert their role in contemporary American politics that, more and more frequently, was based on visuality, urbanization, and modernity. The problem, to be sure, was the color line, but new lines began redefining the boundaries of culture, psychology, and geography.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Talented Tenth: Bringing Art to the Masses African American idealism was thus linked to urban space and community behavior. Indeed, much uplift ideology focused on the structure of black families, with a prejudice toward reestablishing the role of the patriarch as the central figure in African American progress. As early as 1899, for example, Du Bois, in The Philadelphia Negro, condemned “what he deem[ed] the lax sexual morals of the African American working classes: ‘sexual looseness is to-day the prevailing sin of the mass of the Negro population.’”10 The evidence of this “laxity” could be found, according to Du Bois, in the high ratio of unmarried couples living together in the city’s Seventh Ward, a situation that clashed with the scholar’s understanding of progress as secured through a stable, intact family structure. The privileging of “domestic virtue, symbolized by home, family, chastity, and respectability, all infused with an ethic of religious piety, provided the moral criteria for uplift’s cultural aesthetic,” anchored by striving, achievement, and the maintenance of a moral lifestyle.11 For Du Bois, this cultural framework set the stage for the ways in which the city, especially for African Americans, would be presented in the early part of the century, because urban space—often as much an imagined as a real site of vice—could lead to the moral downfall of new migrants.12 The Philadelphia Negro was Du Bois’s attempt to shift assumptions of African American inferiority away from contemporary biological notions of degeneracy toward a discussion of immoral urban spaces that bred poverty, ignorance, and sexual deviancy. In this, Du Bois recognized “that the city was an environment radically different from the small towns and rural plantations of the south.”13 He was, in effect, one

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of the originators of a branch of environmental determinism that continues to inform contemporary discussions of black urban experiences. As mentioned, education was a central component of uplift ideology. Whether it was to provide access to formal education (through academic endeavor) or through the example set by an educated elite, Du Boisian frameworks of uplift outlined the role of the “better classes” in elucidating the codes of appropriate behavior for the black masses. For Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.”14 From very early in the twentieth century, civic and social institutions focused on education. “The Urban League and YMCA, as well as the black churches and press, organized campaigns to instruct newcomers in the norms and values of respectability, encouraging cleanliness, sobriety and restrained behavior in public places.”15 The black press was also instrumental in setting this agenda. Newspapers such as the New York Age, the Chicago Defender, and the Baltimore Afro-American Ledger published accounts of urban life, modeling appropriate city living from a middle-class perspective. Realty agencies also linked uplift with urban space; in advertisements appearing in the first few issues of the Crisis, for example, Philip A. Payton Jr.’s Afro-American Realty Company voiced a concern with the “Moral and Civic Tone of the Negro Community” and offered dwelling in Harlem as a healthy, more upright, alternative. By referencing contemporary cultural concerns (including substandard housing conditions, segregation, black economic agency, and the general moral uplift of the community), realtors symbolically, if not physically, constructed Harlem as the place where the race would transform itself. In other words, realtors offered representations of the neighborhood in advance of literary schools or groups. Indeed, the capitalists of Harlem already “wrote” the neighborhood as a place of promise and selfimprovement before it would be celebrated as such in the 1920s. In effect, the periodicals reveal a direct relationship between bourgeois cultural ideals and real estate interests, a link that would be continued in magazines like the Crisis, which often featured articles on home ownership as a measure of success.16 The contradictions among uplift’s moral, cultural, and economic interests suggests the tension straddling the “glory, wealth, and freedom” of northern urban spaces and the crushing realities exposed by studies such as Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro, where poverty, illness (tuberculosis and infant mortality, for example), vice, and moral turpitude defined existence for blacks in these same idealized spaces. Uplift was an “ideological response by blacks to a segregated, deeply racist society that prescribed their subordinate place and [thus] circumscribed opportunities.”17 Elite blacks extolled “Victorian and European cultural ideals” and looked with “disapproval” on leisure activities, especially popular entertainments such as ragtime and vaudeville that had the potential to introduce migrants to the city’s undesirable elements and that used

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nineteenth-century stereotypes and caricatures of blacks for their appeal.18 New Negro ideology and aesthetics of the 1920s reacted specifically against just such “Old Negro” representations of plantation life and minstrelsy, and the minstrel figure became the “fixed sign of a slave past.”19 Thus, the city became the battleground over which African American identity was fought. And the fiercest battles were waged over what form art should take to best present modern black life to the black and white masses. Although Du Bois did not directly identify a system of African American aesthetics this early in his career (this would not occur until 1926 with “Criteria of Negro Art”), his writings suggest an affinity with Victorian and European cultural ideals, particularly those associated with nineteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold.20 Like Du Bois, much of the educated black elite celebrated these values and viewed black culture as “an admissible idea only within the context of elite culture.”21 In the arts, for example, black artists closely associated with “higher” art forms—painting, sculpture, poetry—were promoted by the black bourgeoisie, indicating what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls the “direct relation between the race’s creation of ‘art’ and its realization of its political desires.”22 Nevertheless, while the race was producing and re-producing its purportedly refined image, it questioned the forms within which it would be represented. For this particular class of black culture, proper aesthetics resided uneasily between those works associated with Victorian ideals and those nineteenth-century cultural works increasingly aligned with modernization and industrialization, namely popular theatrical forms, such as minstrelsy, and the scientific discourses that influenced photography and film. It is in this light that I want to consider Paul Laurence Dunbar’s novel The Sport of the Gods (1902) because it is an important and transitional work that provides a representational language for black migrants in northern cities insofar as this language elucidates the aesthetic tensions black artists navigated to represent “proper” black culture. Historically and aesthetically positioned between the “Plantation school” melodramas and autobiographies (often slave narratives) of the nineteenth century and the modernist Harlem Renaissance prose and verse of the 1920s and ’30s, Dunbar’s novel tells a migration tale that incorporates the past and anticipates the generic and aesthetic elements of future literature. The novel’s formal strategy mirrors African American migration through the characters’ (the Hamiltons) movements between the South and the North. Once in New York, the Hamiltons move to the Tenderloin district on Manhattan’s West Side where there is “the sense of an Afro-American community in the process of evolution.”23 The Sport of the Gods is significant because it identifies an African American urban community and voice that sketches African American experience through fictional forms that will be contested and reconfigured in the early twentieth century.

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This Is Not a Coon Show: Uplift Aesthetics and the City Published in 1902, before the growth of a sizable black community in Harlem, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods is set in the Tenderloin district and tells what first appears to be a fairly traditional cautionary tale of the dangers of the city for black rural migrants. Significantly, these dangers are associated with popular leisure pursuits such as vaudeville. In the novel, a young urbanite takes the new arrivals—Fannie, Joe, and Kit Hamilton—to a popular venue in the Tenderloin district that features a “coon show” with black dancers, singers, and comedians. Dunbar describes Fannie’s response to the performance in detail: “Mrs. Hamilton was divided between shame at the clothes of some of the women and delight with the music. . . . At first she was surprised at the enthusiasm over just such dancing as she could see any day from the loafers on the street corners down home, and then, like a good, sensible, humble woman, she came around to the idea that it was she who had always been wrong in putting too low a value on really worthy things. So she laughed and applauded with the rest, all the while trying to quiet something that was tugging at her way down in her heart.”24 Although she is not a member of the northern black bourgeoisie, Fannie’s discomfort at the performance suggests her status as an upright, God-fearing family woman from “down home,” an example of Washington’s ideal agrarian homemaker. As we can see, her unease is soon replaced by pleasure as she gradually finds value in something that she had previously associated with southern indigence and sloth, yet the presence of a “tugging . . . way down in her heart” suggests that these particular forms of popular entertainment—the coon songs and minstrelsy performed on the urban stage—force her into a moment of Du Boisian double-consciousness. This split is an important precursor to the Harlem novels of the 1920s, such as Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), that detail the tensions between urbanization and popular black art forms. Dunbar’s description of the coon show audience is prescient—including Fannie’s reaction to the spectacle both in the theater and on the stage—because it captures the complex nexus of race, class, and culture already in place in America at this time. If the ideals of the Talented Tenth clashed with the more popular forms of black culture in actual cityspaces like Harlem—where blacks mixed with whites and the black bourgeoisie commingled with new migrants (“a generation removed from slavery” and possessing a “certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie,” as Du Bois put it)—it was this clash that invariably came to define early-twentieth-century black culture. Hence, while urban black elites had the opportunity to “sit with Shakespeare” and “move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas”25 in places like New York, many African American city dwellers preferred the minstrelsy of black-face performers like Sam Lucas, the performing

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duo of Bert Williams and George Walker, and later, the pleasures of nickelodeons and movie theaters. This lack of conformity with the ideals of uplift ideology chaperoned by Du Bois’s elites was a significant cause of tension between different strata of the urban black community. Migrants chose to spend their newly acquired leisure time watching entertainments from the rural South to the extent that antebellum narratives and imagery reemerged in the performance codes of vaudeville and early film exhibition.26 To attend these forms of entertainment, however, was not to blindly accept racist stereotypes; to be sure, performers such as Bert Williams and George Walker were actively engaged in questioning the blackface tradition from within.27 Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods models these contradictory attitudes toward urban entertainment. From his eloquent exegeses on the virtues and limitations of urban life, to the world-weariness of the characters collected in the Banner Club, “an institution for the lower education of Negro youth” where young Joe Hamilton spends much of his time, Dunbar is presciently aware of the multiple factors that tug at a new migrant’s heart.28 Thomas Morgan argues that The Sport of the Gods creates a “viable form of urban blackness in fiction” that exists beyond the strict conventions of southern pastoral literature.29 New York, in this scenario, functions as “something outside the pastoral South’s overdetermined field of representation and social regulation” and, as such, a potentially new trope in African American literary aesthetics.30 According to Morgan, the city’s lack of community, the family’s disintegration within its borders, and the elder Hamilton’s’ decision to return south to Virginia at the novel’s conclusion suggest that, ultimately, Dunbar questions the contemporary benefits of this new space for black subjectivity in the twentieth century. Morgan is correct in his assertion that Dunbar’s text “pummels the reader with naturalistic effect to document the over-determination of black characters by white America,”31 but he underestimates the novel’s success in identifying an urban space and language for African Americans. Indeed, it is precisely in the Banner Club (the institution for “lower education”) where we see the author’s most effective rehearsal of a viable black cityspace: its walls contain a collection of characters that combine, like the novel itself, both southern and northern experiences that suggest the heterogeneity of black life by illustrating the direct connections and cross-fertilization between the North and South, and urban and rural. Further, scenes in the club illustrate the way in which cabarets, theaters, and other popular leisure posts helped to mitigate the isolation felt by many new migrants. Such spaces enabled and often encouraged a certain amount of heteroglossia, from the exchange of personal histories to the pleasures (often audible) of stage and screen entertainments.32 A conversation, for example, between Joe Hamilton and Sadness (a character named thus because “a distinct relative of [his] once had a great grief [and he] never recovered from it”)33 suggests the layered significations enacted by

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characters in the club. Early in the novel Sadness attempts to dissuade Joe from pursuing a life of drinking, gambling, and vice. He explains to the younger man his reasons for being in New York and, in the process, evokes a wider community through his assumption of a commonality of experiences among the bar’s patrons: “Your case isn’t half as bad as that of nine-tenths of the fellows that hang around here. Now, for instance, my father was hung. . . . Oh yes, but it was done with a very good rope and by the best citizens of Texas, so it seems that I really ought to be very grateful to them for the distinction they conferred upon my family, but I am not. I am ungratefully sad.”34 Like the Hamilton’s’ misfortunes, which start in the South, Dunbar’s evocation of the black polis in the club links the North with the South through similar migration stories. More important, its reference to racial violence blurs the lines between the fictional diegesis and the actual world. As Dunbar’s text suggests, the new century brought no reduction in the number of lynchings and other racially motivated attacks on black people. In invoking lynching, Dunbar reminds readers that the history of the growth of African American urban neighborhoods was deeply rooted in southern white violence perpetrated on black bodies. Indeed, Sadness’s name suggests the ways in which this history has defined him and many others like him. The initial critical reception to Dunbar’s works reveals the tensions between more accepted and respected forms of African American literature and those linked specifically to folk culture through a focus on uneducated urban migrants or the use of dialect. For example, over his tragically short career, Dunbar produced multiple volumes of poetry, novels, the lyrics for at least one Williams and Walker minstrel show, Senegambian Carnival, and, with Will Marion Cook, the lyrics for Clorindy: The Origins of the Cake Walk (1898) and In Dahomy (1903). Dunbar wrote poetry both in dialect and Standard English, though he was lauded specifically as the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” by Booker T. Washington and famously praised by the dean of American realism, William Dean Howells, for his dialect poetry. Nonetheless, Dunbar struggled to be recognized for his Standard English works rather than his dialect poetry, which, as he viewed it, tended toward minstrelsy (albeit a more probing version). For example, he complained to James Weldon Johnson that “I’ve got to write dialect poetry; it’s the only way I can get them to listen to me.”35 And while The Sport of the Gods contains elements of Dunbar’s more popular dialect work, particularly in the voices of the elder Hamiltons, it was not well received. Kevin Gaines argues that the novel’s unfavorable reception was “grounded in the mass culture of Progressive Era journalism and popular music and stage shows, whose racial content, minstrel trappings, and working-class settings writers of uplifting race literature [such as Charles Chestnutt and Pauline Hopkins, Dunbar’s contemporaries] would have scoffed at.”36 In short, it focused too much on the travails of newly arrived

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migrants and not enough on middle-class success. Furthermore, the Hamiltons’ urban failures force them to return to the South, a conclusion perhaps untenable for the novel’s contemporary urban readers. The novel’s reception suggests the tensions among urban space (and modernization), black politics of uplift, and the search for a black aesthetics or voice at this moment in history. It was, in its attempt to create a new twentieth-century black culture, ahead of its time. This is particularly true in its evocation of formal devices that conjure contemporary visual culture (vaudeville) and sound (dialect). In effect, Dunbar puts nineteenth-century cultural forms to the service of a new movement. Moreover, his naturalist style, often beholden to the conventions of realism, anticipates the aesthetic and political tensions that the technologies of photography and film later exacerbated.37

Cynosures of the Race: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Paris Exposition Photographs and Representing an African American Ideal The Sport of the Gods suggests that by the turn of the century, African American writers had commenced the struggle to find a new voice in a form that might adequately communicate the contradictions of modern, urban living. Often this endeavor is associated with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance who created modernist works of enduring formal and narrative mastery. Like the treatment of the novels from this time, much of the critical work on African American visual representation has focused on the texts produced in the years following 1920.38 And indeed, some of the best-known representations of the New Negro come from this moment in Harlem’s history; for example, many authors and critics incorporated images—prints, photogravures, daguerreotypes, and photographs—into their novels and anthologies, most notably, Alain Locke in the “Harlem Issue” of Survey Graphic (1925). But, like the concept of the New Negro, visual culture was used to represent the race before the Harlem Renaissance years. In fact, we can see earlier efforts to visualize black life coinciding with literary attempts, such as Dunbar’s, to author new African American subjectivities in increasingly urban surroundings. Because much early race discourse was concerned with representation, discussions of black visual aesthetics were often focused on the presentation of ideal “types,”39 a response not only to centuries of stereotype and caricature, but also a more immediate rejoinder to turn-of-the-century Social Darwinism, phrenology, and eugenics that sought to assert black inferiority (and, therefore, white superiority) through science, particularly sciences that used ontological discourses predicated on the visual. One example that offered a new representation of black Americans derives from John H. Adams Jr.’s “A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman.” In the August 1904 edition of the Atlantabased monthly magazine Voice of the Negro, Adams identifies the distinctive

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roles of African American women in the New Negro movement. The accompanying engravings present the visual correlative of the New Negro woman and suggest the way that the black bourgeoisie attempted to “restructure the race’s image of itself.” The images, combined with text describing the women as “strong,” “kind,” “dignified,” and “college-trained,” depict the ways in which New Negroes desired to see themselves and to have others see them.40 A few months later Adams published a similar article devoted to “The New Negro Man.” Thus, he presented examples of both genders as models of black life, letters, and arts that neatly aligned with Du Bois’s descriptions of the Talented Tenth. While Du Bois may have been a bit subtler in his identification of ideal types, once he became editor of the Crisis in 1911, he used Adams’s engravings of different subjects to grace the journal’s early covers. In this way, Du Bois reified a particular version of black life in a journal that directly addressed the black bourgeoisie. Painter Henry Ossawa Tanner and sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller further complemented the aesthetic tastes of the black bourgeoisie because they, like Adams, produced “dignified images of ideal ‘Negro types’” for both black and white viewers.41 Tanner is perhaps best known for The Banjo Lesson (1893), a work influenced by Thomas Eakins (his instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy

2. A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman, John H. Adams Jr., in Voice of the Negro (August 1904). Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library.

FIGURE

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of Fine Arts) and his five-year sojourn spent in Paris at the renowned L’Académie Julien. Soon after The Banjo Lesson, Tanner returned to Paris, where he abandoned paintings of idyllic black life for biblical and historical subject matter, the latter a highly respected and recognized form of painting among European artists.42 Despite his short-lived foray into black folk subjects, Tanner’s canvases provide a visual suggestion of the belles-lettres aesthetics preferred by the black middle-classes. His European-inflected forms render a romantic southern pastoral that became the “paragon of positivism for the African American popular imagination in the welter of cultural stereotyping and ridicule.”43 His evocation of southern rural folk culture attracted the attention and support of people like Washington, Du Bois, and, later, Alain Locke, who considered the artist a “path breaker in an art documenting Negro life.”44 Like The Souls of Black Folk a few years later, Tanner’s genre paintings connected “the folk” and, more important, folk aesthetics to a specific place, the rural

FIGURE 3. The New Negro Man,

John H. Adams Jr., in Voice of the Negro (October 1904). Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library.

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South, and offered a rejoinder to rural minstrel images that flattered black bourgeois sensibilities. Before Adams and Tanner created their versions of ideal black life, however, the science of photography had aided in the rendering of racial hierarchies according to visual types. One of the first examples of the use of photographic images for such ends appeared in a series of daguerreotypes commissioned by Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz. In 1850, Agassiz hired J. T. Zealy to shoot photographic portraits of African-born slaves from Columbia, South Carolina, which he then used to illustrate his theories of “polygenesis” through the photographic classification of corporeal difference (figs. 4–5). For Agassiz, the daguerreotype’s apparent indexical connection to its subject, the seemingly unmediated relationship between sitter and photographic representation, allowed for, even enabled, an accurate and truthful rendering of reality. It thus provided “firsthand evidence” for the aim of his project: the assertion that different races did not share the same origins.45 These studies were later used as part of Josiah Clark Notland and George Robbins Gliddens’s Types of Mankind (1854), a multivolume encyclopedia that became the textbook for scientists who claimed that different racial groups descended from different origins and were, in fact, different species. For many African Americans, however, photography and other visual media increased the more positive message of uplift discourses while providing a retort to the demeaning depictions of black life promulgated in written and print media. Photography, Deborah Willis argues, offered a “new visual language for ‘reading’ black subjects, [and] an image of self-empowerment.”46 Du Bois was himself a social scientist who was familiar with the power of visual media. As early as 1900, for example, he completed his own visual-anthropological study in a series of 363 photographs prepared for the United States pavilion at the Paris Exposition. Focusing exclusively on Georgia, where he lived during the time as a faculty member at Atlanta University, Du Bois prepared three albums of daguerreotypes split into two sections: Types of American Negroes, Georgia U.S.A. (figs. 6–7), and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A.47 If Du Bois’s photographs provide insights into African American life at the turn of the century, they do so to the extent that they reveal his complex and somewhat contradictory understandings of the use of photography in scientific discourse. His portraits not only counter the veracity of scientific photography that demeaned black subjects, but the same technology allowed him to re-present African Americans as attractive, engaging, and successful. In short, Du Bois’s Paris Exposition daguerreotypes constitute a “counterarchive” against projects that relied on camera technology to confirm eugenic claims about nonwhite bodies.48 Du Bois, according to Shawn Michelle Smith, “draws upon the codes of different photographic practices in his Paris Exposition albums,” creating a “tension between . . . identification and identity—one scientific and ‘objective,’

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FIGURE 4. Jack, frontal, J. T. Zealy (1850). Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of

Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, No. 35–5–10/53043(60742037).

one auratic and sentimental.”49 On the one hand, Du Bois, using daguerreotypes commissioned from Atlanta-based photographer Thomas E. Askew, presents examples of black men and women (students at Atlanta University) that adhere closely—at least in the arrangement of bodies—to the images used by racialist scientists such as Agassiz and eugenicist Francis Galton. On the other hand, Du Bois’s full frontal and profile portraits of young black men and women mimic these earlier presentations of blackness yet “invert the dominant significations of these particular [racist] photographic signs.”50 Through this process of mimicry and inversion, Du Bois’s daguerreotypes also enact a visual dialogue

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FIGURE 5. Jack, profile, J. T. Zealy (1850). Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of

Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, No. 35–5–10/53044(60742038).

between two different versions (representations) of black life. Indeed, the portraits “visualize power” in their self-conscious assertion of racist conventions.51 Nevertheless, Smith suggests that a difference exists between photographs marked as strictly “scientific” and those appearing later in the album that follow the conventions of middle-class portraiture by presenting the “personhood” of the sitter in what Allan Sekula has called “telling details.”52 The subjects are no longer paired, and the framing is more open, allowing the mise-en-scène to present character through costume, props, and setting. The sitters’ clothing and accessories signify their positions as members of the African American middle class: lace collars, feathered hats, and cravats. The settings include drawing

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FIGURE 6. W.E.B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900). Courtesy of the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

rooms, libraries, and other spaces that connote middle-class comfort and achievement. In more than one print, books are prominently placed in the foreground, announcing the importance of education in this staged version of black life. In all, Du Bois’s daguerreotypes resemble many of the middle-class portraits commissioned by the black—and white—bourgeoisie during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not insignificantly, his use of this genre suggests the ways in which the camera “offered African Americans disempowered in white culture a way to empower [them]selves through representation.”53 The images also offer a very explicit, middle-class rejoinder to Agassiz’s “types of mankind” by providing an assimilationist counternarrative to racial inferiority, or what Houston A. Baker refers to as the “deformation of mastery,” a strategy of reworking rhetorical or aesthetic conventions for different ends.54 The Paris Exposition albums also include daguerreotypes depicting various examples of black life in Georgia. Most of these images are of religious or civic groups in Atlanta and provide examples of a “well-to-do urban population.”55 They feature groups of people posed in domestic and business interiors or in front of homes, churches, or businesses. Though slightly different in content from the portraits, the images provide further visual details of particular “types” of African Americans. Subjects are arranged in front of attractive homes,

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FIGURE 7. W.E.B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900). Courtesy of the Daniel Murray Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

businesses, and churches in highly formalized compositions closely resembling the collection’s portraits, and projecting in costume and setting an identifiably middle-class world. In this way, they foreground African American achievement through the themes of education, religion, business, and family life (again presented through mise-en-scène). And yet, while they depict prosperous city dwellers, Atlanta’s urbanscape is excluded from the frame. This is especially striking, as such care is taken with mise-en-scène; it implies that place is less important than the “type” of people and institutions presented. At the same time, the portraits offer examples of the ways in which African American intellectuals and artists in fact struggled to represent urban space. For Du Bois, the city was a means to an end in this context; that is, it provided the mise-en-scène within which ideal examples of an educated and prosperous elite could be found. Still, the portraits lack markers of urban space—bustling crowds, busy sidewalks, moving traffic, and densely arranged architecture. Instead, clothing, objects, and single-family homes connote middle-class urban life. In addition to the Atlanta images, the Paris Exposition collection included approximately 150 images from other parts of the South. While the focus of this section was educational institutions, such as Fisk, Howard, and Tuskegee, the photographs also presented examples of houses, businesses, and churches.

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According to David Levering Lewis, “the Negro Exhibit at Paris was a racial imperative, a momentous opportunity and obligation to set the great white world straight about black people.”56 Du Bois’s daguerreotypes and the portraits of middle-class blacks were “considered as powerful as the written word as black people struggled to persuade the American public to change their notions about race and equality.”57 Like the Atlanta daguerreotypes, the images in this section are of the African American middle class—clergy and congregation, business leaders, families, students at institutions of higher learning—and present a “small nation of people,” again through the themes of education, church, and business ownership.58 And similar to Du Bois’s selections from Atlanta, location is secondary to the projection of a specific image of culture and achievement. Here, education, commerce, and religion are synecdochic of African American success and of the city as a whole. The work of early African American photographers like Thomas Askew and Cleveland-based (later New York) C. M. Battey provides examples of the black elites’ desire to represent themselves through a visual medium that marked a discourse of authenticity (founded on the mimetic qualities of the photographic image) and image-building. Later photographers like Harlem-based James VanDerZee continued this style of portraiture, using “pictorial conventions that commercial portrait photographers had been employing since the 1860s . . . [and] visual cognates found in the cartes-des-visites [sic] and cabinet-card portraits made after the Civil War,” which were quite popular with the black and white middle classes.59 The daguerreotypes and photographs served a dual function, to present life (or at least a portion of it) as the black middle class experienced it and to provide a symbolic, if not “old-fashioned” or idealist, version of African American life. The photograph’s power was not only that it could show people as they were, but it could also show people as they thought they should be. Whether they were used for sociological or anthropological studies, as private cartes-de-visite, or as cabinet cards “meant for sympathetic eyes [and] circulated among one’s family and friends,”60 early-twentieth-century photographs of black subjects countered racist discourses (both scientific and popular) with an assumed veracity and a self-conscious eye toward image construction. In other words, they were both truth- and storytelling devices. The development of moving pictures, as we will see, continued this often-contradictory legacy of African American authenticity and narrative in the visual construction of a community.

Minstrelsy and Early American Film: Black Bodies in Motion With the Paris Exposition daguerreotypes, a later study of body types in 1906, and his use of the John H. Adams engravings and other images in the Crisis, Du Bois not only “signified” on scientific photographic practices, he also provided a

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counterimage to the minstrelsy that prevailed in American popular culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.61 While eugenics and phrenology relied on scientific discourses to shore up theories of racial hierarchies, the majority of white Americans arrived at their often limited knowledge of African American life through a vast array of song and verse from vaudeville, the minstrel stage, print images, consumer products, and advertisements that drew from minstrelsy conventions. According to Gates, for example, by 1900 “it would have been possible for a middle-class white American to see Sambo images from toaster and teapot covers on his breakfast table, to advertisements in magazines, to popular postcards in drug stores.”62 Like scientific photography, these images narrated, if not radiated, black inferiority. Between 1890 and 1910, for example, the national fascination with “coon songs” reached its peak, and “existing stereotypes [of blacks] came to be either confirmed or embellished and indelibly encoded as part of the semiotic system of the period.”63 Coon songs presented a black world characterized by laziness, criminality, violence, and sexual deviancy and were “a manifestation of a peculiar form of the will to believe—to believe in the signified ‘coon’ as represented in the songs—as a necessary sociopsychological mechanism for justifying segregation and subordination.”64 For their white audiences, this array of media supported the reversal of Reconstruction-era civil rights gains and allayed middle-class (both white and black) fears of an increasing black presence in northern urban areas. For their black audiences, as we saw in The Sport of the Gods, this form of popular culture also served a much more complex set of purposes because it not only spoke to an urban spectatorship, but it provided an occasion for bonding through leisure activities. Minstrelsy, especially blackface minstrelsy, had multiple, often contradictory effects on its audiences during the nineteenth century. What is most important for the present discussion is the way in which minstrelsy, whether performed by white or black entertainers, was a self-conscious performance mode that presented highly constructed vignettes of “black life.” From the first time that Thomas Rice “jumped Jim Crow” in 1831, through the remainder of the century, blackface minstrelsy was engaged in a complex dialogue with largescale social and political changes. For example, early minstrel performers like Rice, Edwin P. Christy, Dan Emmett, and many others were mostly northern whites who used the minstrel stage to support and redefine themselves while also presenting a mythic construction of southern plantation life. But minstrel performers were just as likely to reference urban life on stage, and the character of the “zip coon” was based on the idea of a northern, urban free black man. Even before the growth of African American neighborhoods in cities like New York, therefore, the minstrel show was already experiencing its own form of urbanization: “For the minstrels, as for the new mass audience upon which they depended, the city was the focal experience of life. The city offered (or seemed

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to offer) new sorts of work, money, movement, excitement. It offered access to liquor and sex, to education, culture, progress.”65 The story behind Ernest Hogan’s song “The Phrenologist Coon” (1901) suggests the ways in which minstrel performers and coon songwriters were not only cognizant of race discourses but also consciously played upon their audience’s familiarity with such contentions. Published at roughly the same time as Du Bois’s Paris Exposition photographs, Hogan’s songs point to the ways in which scientific discourses used for racial typing were familiar to the masses and readily available and open to parody (if not satire). In this example, an African American minstrel performer and one of the originators of ragtime (who was also responsible for “All Coons Look Alike to Me”) wrote the lyrics. The song was originally performed by Bert Williams and George Walker, black minstrels who, by the turn of the century, had already achieved fame for their stage show The Gold Bug in 1896 (of the two, only Williams wore blackface; Walker did not). While these performers seem to be perpetuating “coon” stereotypes, their performances can be understood, as Louis Chude-Sokei suggests in a slightly different context, as a form of “nationalist minstrelsy . . . [in which] a primitivist representation of the Negro is deployed against its racist intent.”66 In what is at first glance a demeaning stereotype, “The Phrenologist Coon” might, indeed, be something much more involved, because it suggests that black artists were self-consciously dialoging with political context prior to the modernist explorations of affirmative black identity by the Harlem Renaissance writers, similarly to the ways in which Du Bois mimicked and deconstructed scientific photography with his Paris Exposition photographs. My point is not to argue for the libratory potential of minstrelsy here; rather it is to suggest that debased cultural forms like vaudeville have much more to tell us about cultural authorship at this time than the fact that African Americans were stereotyped in turnof-the-century popular culture. They also can tell us much about early African American attitudes toward the cinema, as the two have much in common. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, the minstrel show and the coon song, like the cinema, were two of the leading popular entertainments for white and black urban audiences. With the development of motion picture technologies in 1895, it was not long before the cinema contributed another layer to early-twentieth-century strategies of African American image production. Cinema occupies an important, if not erratic and contradictory, position in the history of African American political discourses, as well as in the history of Harlem. Like photography, cinema—a key tool for the sciences because of its mimetic and mythmaking capabilities—was instrumental in the shaping and representation of African American life on screen. Like other popular entertainments, cinema was a low-cost leisure activity that entertained audiences by drawing on familiar minstrel figures and scenarios. The contradictions between

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entertainment and representation, along with the expense of film production and exhibition, suggest possible factors for the lag between African American attempts to represent the race elsewhere and the reticence toward moving pictures as the form within which to do so. Although African American production companies were not established until William Foster founded the Chicago-based Foster Photoplay Company in 1910, black actors and stories existed in cinema from its inception, appearing first in a number of one-shot films featuring dancing, baby washing, and/or watermelon eating. Unlike the common belief that blackface minstrelsy was immediately transferred into early film, many of the short films made by the Edison, American Mutoscope (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company after 1899), and Lubin Companies used black actors (not whites in blackface), especially in shorts depicting popular stage performances. For example, The Pickaninny Dance—From the “Passing Show”/The Pickanninies (Edison, 1894), James Grundy, [no. 1]/Buck and Wing Dance (Edison, 1895), and James Grundy, [no. 2]/ Cake Walk (Edison, 1895) feature entertainers and bits from the vaudeville circuit, demonstrating the interpenetration of the two art forms. In these early examples, we see cinema’s inherent contradictions taking shape: the shorts capture actual, often identified, minstrel performers engaged in acts of fiction that were often believed to represent real life. Film’s roots might be in science, but early cinema, especially early American cinema, was just as indebted to fictional storytelling conventions from theater and literature. African American subjects also appeared in more clearly nonfiction films from the time. As early as 1898, for example, the Edison Company filmed black military forces in Colored Troops Disembarking and The Ninth Negro Cavalry Watering Horses, both of which depicted not only the involvement but also the bravery of African American soldiers in the U.S. armed forces. Other subjects include a series of travelogues made by Edison between 1902 and 1903 and featuring West Indians in Nassau. American Mutoscope produced its own series of films detailing various aspects of African American life, most notably a series of shorts filmed at the Lincoln School in Washington, D.C. The films, in keeping with more general race politics of the time, present students in home economics and physical education classes, curricula inspired by Booker T. Washington’s political and pedagogical writings. The fiction films were most often one-shot, one-reel depictions of characters or events. Over the next decade, however, the development of story films extended the complexity of cinematic narrative, and along with this white actors wearing blackface increasingly supplanted African American actors in stories, “adapting popular minstrel and performance styles [from the stage] to the screen.”67 Some films, like What Happened in a Tunnel (Edison, 1903) and A Bucket of Cream Ale (American Mutoscope, 1904) are set in unspecified locations, but the majority of films from this time are set in the rural South in a

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series of celluloid plantation dramas inspired by Plantation school novels, most notably Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Edison, 1902), which was repeatedly remade during the silent era. Other examples include The Chicken Thief (American Mutoscope, 1904) and The Watermelon Patch (Edison, 1905). Like their literary and visual precursors, many of the story films (especially those detailing black subservience and/or criminality), were a means of “disavow[ing], via mass culture, Black agency and progress,” by presenting black subjects as backward, uncivilized, or as comic buffoons to both white and black audiences, as they were available to all viewers.68 Like the stories and novels from which they were adapted, many early film narratives depict African American characters in rural settings, and they draw on familiar visual and narrative codes, precisely those that Du Bois was questioning in his Paris Exposition portraits. So, how did popular urban culture—vaudeville, minstrelsy, and film—align with the black bourgeoisie’s desires to author a distinct image? And how might we begin to understand this complicated relationship between documentation and cinematic mythmaking in light of the growth of Harlem, another major component of African American modernity? The black middle class had a stake in the development of the burgeoning urban communities and took an interest in the smooth assimilation of new migrants to the city. Like many white middle-class progressivists, the black bourgeoisie sought to lead newcomers away from urban temptations, such as drinking, gambling, and sex, in order to initiate them into the purported pleasures and benefits of middle-class norms and behaviors. To this end, black churches and other social institutions, along with the black press, “organized campaigns to instruct newcomers in the norms and values of respectability, encouraging cleanliness, sobriety, and restrained behavior in public places.” Despite these attempts, many newly arrived migrants and other working-class blacks “chose ‘enthusiastic worship’ and a ‘lively nightlife’ as respite from tedious, physically draining occupations. Boisterous recreation in clubs, saloons, dance halls, and picture houses attracted the scorn of the staid ‘respectables,’ but was integral to the leisure activities of most urban black workers.”69 During this period, the black urban community held contradictory attitudes toward leisure pursuits. Theaters and nickelodeons were places where working-class blacks could relax and enjoy the benefits of urban living: extra time and money. Indeed, as Jacqueline Stewart suggests, increased leisure time was both the appeal and the shock of the city for recently arrived southerners on Chicago’s South Side. For migrants more accustomed to the daily rhythms and patterns of the agrarian South, “Urban experiences such as industrial labor, streetcar travel, and entertainments like the cinema reshaped the im/migrant’s sense of time and space.”70 In particular, black migrants “frequently cited increases in leisure time and disposable income and the wider choice of recreational activities as major improvements in their daily lives.”71 To return briefly

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to Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, the Hamiltons’ experiences in New York suggest that leisure venues, like theaters and clubs, often created the opportunity for community-formation among migrants who found themselves far from home and family.72 Nevertheless, the black bourgeoisie and other reformers feared that amusements such as vaudeville and moving pictures reinforced the inferior status of their black audiences, a fear realized in complex and multiple ways. First, the content of early films, as previously discussed, often presented narratives of black backwardness. These early films disavowed African American modernity and progress, a practice that continued and developed along with the expansion of narrative and other cinematic devices (e.g., editing), culminating most infamously in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Second, nickelodeons and theaters were often segregated, even in more established black neighborhoods like Chicago’s South Side and Harlem. In the latter, black audiences were required to sit in the second balcony of such venues as the Alhambra Theatre on 126th Street after it opened in 1905. This early segregation in Harlem was a sign of the area’s growing African American population and the response to such growth by the influential business interests in the area, but it also suggests that segregation was widespread at this time.73 Third, African Americans were excluded from all aspects of the movie business because a few companies controlled early production (and technology). Theater ownership was equally as difficult because it involved a huge financial outlay. For the established urban middle class, theaters, nickelodeons, and movie houses raised further concerns about the behavior of the black working class and newly arrived southern migrants. Not only was moral decline feared, prompting “Black leaders (like their white counterparts) to condemn cheap amusements such as the movies,”74 but also the “boisterous behavior [the movies] encouraged among many working class African-Americans” created much unease.75 In 1910 in Harlem, for example, some black clergymen “called for a crusade against all film,” arguing that church attendance had decreased since 1906 with the rise of the nickelodeons in the area.76 Black Chicagoans expressed similar sentiments: The Chicago Defender, for example, provided details of middle-class displeasure with the “undesirable elements in the audiences of Southside movie houses.”77 Although movie houses often mixed people of different races and classes, the improper behavior of working-class blacks alarmed the black bourgeoisie. Worse, to them it presented a bad image to white audiences, thereby undermining their attempts to prove African American equality through exemplary public behavior. The response to different forms of popular entertainments—vaudeville, ragtime, and film—suggests a dichotomy between the city that the black elites desired and the one that was rapidly establishing itself in places like Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit. In the face of such a massive transformation in living

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conditions and cultural identifications, the black elite “looked with disapproval, if not covert and guilty pleasure, upon such emergent black cultural forms as ragtime, blues, jazz, and the social dance styles that animated black vaudeville [and] minstrel troupes,”78 because such pastimes opened up the possibility of vice for the less-sophisticated migrants from the rural South to display alternative reactions to what was undeniably pleasurable. Early cinema thus often elicited diametrically opposed responses. On the one hand, it offered community-building possibilities while, on the other, it held the danger of an extension of larger societal prejudices against African Americans by whites. The cinema, moreover, instantiated an extended dialogue in black urban communities about the relationship between mass culture and African Americans in American society as a whole. If many believed that film and filmgoing would drag down the race, others, most notably Harlem’s Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., argued as early as 1910 that moving pictures needed only to be “purified” rather than avoided. When purged of its immoral content, the cinema had the potential to draw audiences away from more salacious urban vices such as gambling and drinking. Lester Walton, arts critic for the New York Age, also supported certain aspects of moviegoing, praising its emancipatory potential while doubting its claims of veracity. Significantly, he encouraged his readers to see films made by black production companies and to support black-owned theaters.79 From very early in its history, therefore, the cinema was viewed as a mode of cultural production with direct links to race progress. Indeed, the cinema became the medium through which “authentic” black representation was fought, with questions of appropriate content often rubbing up against the desire for entertainment. What remains to be seen in this dynamic is the role that the city played in early cinema and the claims for authenticity. Given that cityspaces like Harlem were rapidly becoming the political and cultural centers of black America, the links between the most modern of the industrial arts and sophisticated black culture were of critical importance.

Early Snapshots of Harlem Life Harlem calls to mind a multiplicity of images, from streetscapes of 125th Street to James VanDerZee’s interwar portraits of neighborhood celebrities, socialites, and everyday people. The neighborhood, however, existed as a written text well before it registered visually in the African American—or, for that matter, American—popular imagination. The earliest identification of Harlem as an African American space appears in the real estate advertisements of black newspapers during the early part of the twentieth century. As early as 1905, for example, Philip A. Payton Jr. was advertising “desirable flats” on 134th Street in the pages of the New York Age. Additionally, the newspaper featured social listings arranged by area, both within and outside the metropolitan

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region, and mentioning Harlem, again, as early as 1905. The social listings provide accounts of the activities of the community’s middle-class population: “Mrs. Cordes of Charleston, S.C., is visiting her brother, W. E. Johnson, 475 East 148th Street,” and “Gertrude B. Carr, Idell Whitehead, Lillian Harris, Margaret Hill, Margaret Martiana and Mary Hunter graduated from Public School 41 ahead of the 43 white girls in their class.”80 The announcements display the achievements of an urban (and sometimes southern) black population, and they map the bourgeoisie’s mobility prior to the years associated with the Great Migration. The activities, added to the paper’s political coverage of issues such as suffrage, segregation, and education, suggests an engaged and active community. The mode of address employed by these periodicals is striking. While weekly newspapers such as the New York Age “appealed primarily to a popular or mass audience,” their articles suggest a more middle-class readership composed of informed race men and women or, at the least, those who liked to think of themselves as such.81 Thus, it is telling that the real estate advertisements, both from Payton’s companies and others, like Nail and Parker, stress the desirability of their Harlem housing stock available for “respectable colored tenants.”82 Throughout, the advertisements continue to emphasize the desirability and modern conveniences (hot water, heat, toilets) found in the area’s newly constructed buildings. The visual organization of the early newspapers is equally revealing, particularly the engravings and photographic portraits used as accompaniments to stories focusing on issues relevant to urban black life.83 In the New York Age, for example, the city’s and the nation’s African American elite appear in portraits resembling those of Du Bois’s Paris Exposition photographs discussed earlier. Like Du Bois’s staged renderings of middle-class life, there are virtually no images of Harlem streets or businesses. No other New York areas associated with an African American population, or engravings or portraits of newly arrived migrants of lowly means are on view. Also, like the images of Atlanta in the Paris Exposition, or New York in Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, Harlem remains at the margins during the early twentieth century, even though, as we have seen, its significance as a site for African American life was growing throughout these years. If Harlem’s visual representation was neglected in the popular press, it was documented even less frequently in film. One reason for this might be that street scenes did not conform to the preferred content of most early American one-shot or story films with black characters, which tended to focus on theatrical performances or rural stories shot in interiors. The closest we get to a cinematic presentation of Harlem during the late 1890s and early 1900s appears in the Edison Company’s City Hall to Harlem (1904). The film is shot from the front of a subway car as it enters a tunnel at the City Hall station and then reemerges

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in Harlem. While there are street scenes on both ends of the tunnel, nothing indicates the presence of African American residents in the neighborhood; in fact, the Harlem exteriors closely resemble the City Hall shots at the opening of the film. The film’s intention, it seems, is to introduce the newly opened subway line and to advertise the ease with which commuters could now move between downtown and uptown neighborhoods.84 In short, Harlem is nothing more than a distant end point in a narrative about the (literal) forward movement of American industrial progress. Cinematic representations of black Harlem may have also been rare because the area had yet to develop into a sizable enough black community to make it identifiable through a range of familiar iconography, such as street signs or business establishments. One film stands out, however, because it is specifically located in a “black” section of Manhattan, and here we return to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s Fights of Nations from 1907. As discussed earlier, the film presents an allegory of the American nation constructed through the myth of immigration and diversity via vignettes of various nationalities and ethnicities engaging in (often slapstick) scenes of conflict. Early scenes identify a variety of peoples: Spanish, Mexican, Jewish, and Scottish. Sandwiched among them is a section, “Sunny Africa, Eighth Avenue New York,” featuring the black patrons of a New York City bar. A couple’s performance of a cakewalk precipitates a fight between two men over a woman, with the victory going to the man with the bigger of two comically large razor blades. A few scenes later, a title card reading, “America, The Land of the Free,” introduces the film’s finale. In the ensuing shot, characters from earlier scenes enter a space framed by American flags and an American eagle. Additionally, an American Indian “squaw,” appears and kneels in supplication before the gathered characters, and all are enveloped in a mythic presentation of an inclusive nation (one that even acknowledges the country’s indigenous peoples). And yet, as discussed at the opening of the chapter, only the African American characters are excluded from this vision of a new nation. Critical responses to Fights of Nations have focused on the absence of black characters from the film’s finale, suggesting as Thomas Cripps has done that, “all are welcome under the American sun except blackfolk.”85 Jacqueline Stewart offers a more detailed discussion of the film, arguing that it tapped into general cultural fears about the mixing of races (socially and biologically) in burgeoning urban areas.86 Yet what both readings miss are the tensions between urbanization, criminality, and citizenship that are clearly visible in Fights of Nations. Such frictions are foregrounded in the recognition and yet misrecognition of black cityspace found in the section’s introductory title, “Sunny Africa, Eighth Avenue New York.” Because the title locates the scene on “Eighth Avenue New York,” the temptation is to read the setting as Harlem, as Stewart has done. And, such a reading makes sense given the specificity of the title card

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and the enduring legacy of black Harlem in American history. Yet, this interpretation overlooks the film’s release date of 1907. During this time there may have been a black presence in Harlem, but it was small and clustered around Seventh Avenue and 134th and 135th Street. It is unlikely, therefore, that audiences from the time would have assumed that the area named in the title was black Harlem. More likely the title card references the Tenderloin district, one of the city’s (at the time) better-known African American neighborhoods, which abutted Eighth Avenue farther downtown. The Tenderloin gained notoriety following a 1900 riot, during which white mobs violently attacked black New Yorkers. The press, including Harper’s Weekly, the New York Herald, and the New York Times, extensively covered the disturbance and introduced the Tenderloin district to many white readers outside the metropolitan region. For readers, the Tenderloin, and African American urban neighborhoods more generally, became equated with violence and unsafe environments—a sentiment held by many black readers as well, either through personal experience or newspaper accounts. Moreover, both black and white readers of Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, along with vaudeville fans, would have a familiarity with the neighborhood’s various attractions, including nightclubs, theaters, and hotels. Another possible interpretation of the title card is that its slippage between the continent, “Africa,” and the avenue initiated a chain of significations denoting a larger and more loosely defined African American urban presence. Here, the combined references to New York and to intraracial violence may have been both a symptom of, and reaction to, fears about the effects of black migration into the city; it is a cautionary acknowledgment of the effects of migration, urbanization, and popular culture. In this way, black progress is disallowed and an African American community is associated with a nexus of behaviors suggestive of barbarity and vice inherited from nineteenth-century scientific publications fully at play in society by this point in time. In this analysis, the film implies that urban racial and social mixing is to be feared for its potential criminality (as much if not more than the possibility of miscegenation), thus reiterating progressivist discourses but specifically identifying blacks as lacking civility and as the cause of all manner of urban vice. The film’s twist, therefore, comes not so much in this obsessive placement of black characters in named places or in the demeaning content of the section as it does in its exclusion of black Americans from its concluding national mosaic. The Biograph bulletin describes the last section thus: “In harmony, peace and goodwill the characters of the different nations appear, making it an allegorical representation of ‘Peace,’ with Uncle Sam presiding at a Congress of the Powers.”87 With this in mind, the absence of black characters from the final vignette suggests that Americans of African descent are not part of this national construction of “harmony, peace, and goodwill.” In the end black characters are

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disallowed entry into “America, the Land of the Free” because, the scene implies, they disrupt American life rather than making it cohere into a unified nation. Beyond projecting larger cultural concerns over immigration (and migration), urbanization, and the nation, the “Sunny Africa” section of Fights of Nations accords with a general trend in early cinema focusing on urban criminality. At roughly the same time, for example, a number of “Black Hand” films appeared following the 1906 release of American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s The Black Hand. The film tells the story of an Italian gang in New York City that kidnaps a butcher’s daughter and sends a “black hand” ransom note to her parents. The gang is eventually arrested, but the film and others like it, “can be taken to mark an extension of public discourse on criminality and the city.” Furthermore, they “figure as complex meditations on, and social articulations of, the problems of crime, cities, sociality, and governance as central problems of modernity in early twentieth-century America.”88 The Black Hand films also serve as important precursors to gangster films, which often took urbanization, criminality, and nationhood as their primary themes. The Black Hand’s focus on the delinquency of Italian immigrants consolidates a number of the pseudoscientific, political, and social discourses in circulation at the time, which brings us back to, not surprisingly, photography. First, the film, like the “Sunny Africa” portion of Fights of Nations, tapped into the eugenicist belief that “criminality was inextricably linked to racial identities.”89 The Black Hand’s focus on Italian, especially Sicilian, criminality and the slew of subsequent films on similar subject matter function as both a warning and a panacea for audiences—particularly urban audiences—of the time. The films articulate the particularly ethnic and racial dangers of the city, and yet the ultimate demise of the criminals suggests an overall return to moral order. Like Agassiz’s photographic attempts to document markers of racial difference, early American film companies (and here it seems to be American Mutoscope and Biograph in particular) imported such visual practices into the moving image. According to Lee Grieveson, many early crime films continued the tradition of “urban guides, muckraking journalism, visual culture, and realist literature” in “mapping out a moral topography of urban spaces,”90 often linking criminality to identifiable race or ethnic enclaves. The Black Hand, for example, opens with a title card identifying its narrative as “a true story of a recent occurrence in the Italian quarter of New York City.” Such attention to geographic detail, like that in the “Sunny Africa” section of Fights of Nations, had a twofold effect. On the one hand, both films situate their narratives in New York City, a location already coded—through literature, journalism, and photography—as ethnically diverse and crime-ridden.91 On the other hand, the titles serve to differentiate their settings from other parts of the city. For The Black Hand, the setting is the unspecified yet still-identified “Italian quarter.” Likewise, Fights of Nations

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locates itself in “Sunny Africa, Eighth Avenue.” The point is that at this moment in time, city, ethnicity, or race could signify urban difference, one that was coded as criminal and deviant as much as it was (or because it was) ethnic and/or racial. The Black Hand goes even further by announcing itself as a “true story,” thereby connecting the narrative on screen with larger assumptions of photographic veracity. The equation of black (and other ethnic) urbanity with criminality soon became a cinematic trope that appeared in African American “race” films as well as Hollywood productions. This theme, along with a concern among the black middle classes to present ideal African American characters and behaviors, resulted in a crisis of definition for urban spaces like Harlem, which did not become a fully visible signifier in fiction film for nearly two more decades, when it continued to resonate with discourses of criminality and race (the latter through the gangster genre). As I have pointed out, a number of factors delayed the cinematic representation of Harlem, not the least of which had to do with a general lack of interest and faith in the cinema expressed by the black elite. It is most likely, however, that African American intellectual and political leaders were themselves conflicted about the meaning of the city in black life, particularly in the face of growing migration and the increasing availability of different forms of popular culture. The city, especially Harlem, may have promised transformation, but the diversity and commingling of (racial) bodies that went with the area disrupted middle-class attempts to counter nineteenth-century representations of black barbarity. Thus the cynosure of the race, at least visually, remained a certain “ideal” type: middle-class, educated, and located in unspecified spaces. Such conflicts and ambiguity, as we will see in what follows, would have a distinct effect on the nascent black film industry in Harlem.

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Heaven and Hell in Harlem Urban Aesthetics for a Renaissance People

NOTICE We have endeavored for some time to avoid turning over this house to colored tenants, but as a result of . . . rapid changes in conditions . . . this issue has been forced upon us. (Notice on Harlem tenement, 1910)

Two snapshots of Harlem life set the stage for the following discussion of African American politics and poetics during the 1920s and ’30s, a period when large numbers of the African American population moved to northern urban areas around Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and New York City as part of the Great Migration. The first captures a moment on July 28, 1917, when, outraged by recent (and ongoing) incidents of lynching and other acts of racial violence in cities like East St. Louis, Missouri, W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson led an estimated ten thousand marchers from Harlem, down New York’s Fifth Avenue in silent protest against America’s two-tiered system of economic and social (in)justice. With muffled drums and screaming placards, marchers protested the loss of black life, voicing their unhappiness with the government. The second occurred almost two years later, on February 17, 1919, and again documents a march. This time, however, the parade moved up Fifth Avenue from 34th Street before disbanding at Lenox Avenue and 130th Street in the heart of Harlem. The men of the United States 369th Infantry Regiment (formerly the 15th Regiment of the New York National Guard), the “Harlem HellFighters,” were returning home after distinguishing themselves in France. Led by a military band composed of show business notables, including James Reese Europe, Noble Sissle, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and other distinguished musicians and performers, the 369th was met with a hero’s welcome. It was a momentous occasion, documented by the African American and white press in 51

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FIGURE 8. The silent protest march of July 28, 1917. Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library.

articles and, perhaps more important, in still and moving pictures (the march was captured by newsreel as well as still cameras). Besides their status as significant moments in Harlem’s history, these events provide clear indications of the political and social factors that influenced the area’s development as the center of African American life during the 1920s. Although they occurred before the years associated with the Harlem Renaissance, both marches marked the culmination of a shift in African American politics in the early twentieth century. Since the turn of the century, black leaders and intellectuals had sought to determine the direction that a modern, politicized, and engaged black populace would take, a direction that would not only establish a place in American culture, but that would allow black people to take an active role in the growth of the nation. With these two snapshots we see the outcome of such efforts in the form of a new, much more public presentation of African American politics, activism, and race pride. To return to 1917, Du Bois, Johnson, and the thousands marching that day were protesting events that had occurred in East St. Louis, which had recently experienced one of the “worst race riots in American history.”1 Meanwhile, on the eve of World War I, the nation’s black population was asked to contribute to the war effort at home and abroad: the former as a source of industrial labor and the latter in the armed services. East St. Louis, like many northern industrial areas, experienced a rapid growth in its African American population as

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FIGURE 9. The United States 369th Infantry Regiment, the “Harlem Hell-Fighters,”

marching up Fifth Avenue on February 17, 1919. Courtesy of CriticalPast.com.

factories courted southern black workers as a means of cheap labor and a strategy of curtailing nascent (and sometimes not-so-nascent) unionization efforts.2 The tensions between black and white workers in the area culminated in violence resulting in the deaths of approximately one hundred black people and the destruction of hundreds of homes, churches, and stores. While East St. Louis’s African American population was indisputably the victim of white wrath, it is significant that the city’s black residents were armed and prepared to defend themselves, illustrating a momentous shift in the civil rights tactics usually voiced by the black bourgeoisie. The protest march in Harlem was also a march to fight back, though through nonviolent means. Moreover, it indicated a change in the use of photography to record black people’s lives from portraiture to documentation as images of actual people and events were widely reproduced in newspapers and magazines. Unlike the private portraits and cartes-de-visite of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these images were intended for public consumption. Although unintended, the march served as an invaluable photo-op, effectively broadcasting African American empowerment in the face of violence. The Harlem Hell-Fighters’ return was triumphant, but perhaps no less troubled by increasingly fractious national race politics than the events inspiring the Silent Protest March. During their service in Europe, the soldiers of the

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369th Infantry distinguished themselves through acts of bravery while fighting for the French army. While officially part of the 93rd Division, the Hell-Fighters and other black American units (the 369th, 370th, and 371st) were barred from serving as armed fighting units in the segregated Unites States military. Instead, African American soldiers fought as battle units for the French, many earning that nation’s Croix de Guerre for their bravery and service. Nevertheless, on the heels of such honors, the city’s and the nation’s African American leaders celebrated the soldiers’ homecoming: the Hell-Fighters represented irrefutable affirmation of black bravery and patriotism. They provided both real evidence of and symbolic currency to the belief that black Americans should be treated as full-fledged citizens of the United States who, moreover, deserved representation. For everyday black folk, the men of the 369th were cause for race pride, perhaps even more so than the privatized portraiture of the middle classes. At a time when lynching was on the rise, and returning soldiers were met with violence, this was no small feat. It is not ironic that both events have as their backdrop intertwined moments of local and global upheaval. For the silent protestors, economic and social discrimination was increasingly difficult to accept in a nation that trumpeted its democratic foundations but did little to convince its black polis that racism would somehow be overcome. For the crowds gathered to watch the glorious return of the Hell-Fighters, there was hope that the soldiers’ bravery abroad (even if they had not been entrusted to fight for the nation) would usher in a new moment in American history. The effects of photographic images in this endeavor were clear: they highlighted the social progress of the race and they associated that progress with Harlem.

For Respectable Colored Families Only: Demographic Growth in Harlem With the establishment of Philip A. Payton Jr.’s Afro-American Realty Company in 1904, Harlem began opening up to black residents. Black migrants initially moved into the area’s new apartment buildings, escaping the slum neighborhoods of the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill located further downtown. A decade later migration increased, significantly influenced by investment in the area from a number of social and religious institutions, including Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church, which added to the appeal of the area for New York’s middle classes when it moved its property and congregation from downtown to 134th and 135th streets in 1911. Additionally, the area received an influx of out-of-town migrants from the South and the Caribbean islands, all of whom were drawn to the area in hope of finding work in the city’s manufacturing centers. By 1915, New York’s black population had rapidly expanded, fed by a nationwide migration of southern blacks to northern industrial areas. Whereas in

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1910, for example, an estimated 91,000 people of African descent resided in the city (including the boroughs), by 1920 there were 150,000 residents, with almost 110,000 of that number living in Manhattan.3 Most of the growth in Manhattan was in Harlem in a section bordered by 113th and 145th Streets south to north, and Fifth and Eighth Avenues from east to west.4 By 1930, another 165,000 black men, women, and children moved to the neighborhood, drawn by relatively decent, modern housing and by the area’s status as, according to Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., “the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere.”5 The years leading up to and immediately following the United States’s involvement in World War I recorded some of the most significant demographic shifts of African Americans that the young nation had ever experienced. The migration had many well-known contributing factors and consisted of both traditional “push” and “pull” economic and social influences. Although the southern states were a rich agricultural region prior to the Civil War, their economies remained depressed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first decade of the twentieth century, for example, the South was a “colony” of the North, with its raw materials shipped north for manufacture into goods that were then shipped back to southern markets.6 The region was further decimated by a boll weevil infestation that destroyed millions of acres of cotton. Black farmers, most of whom were already trapped by a system of peonage and sharecropping, were particularly hard hit. Added to this was the increase in Jim Crow legislation and racial violence, especially lynching, during the half century following Emancipation. While southern states were experiencing an economic depression linked to their dependency on overfarmed and insect-infested agricultural lands, northern (especially urban) areas were undergoing a fiscal boom. As northern industries achieved even greater war-related growth, many companies looked for cheap, unskilled southern labor (both black and white) to fill their needs. Northern jobs had economic and social appeal. Workers had the potential to earn significantly higher wages in northern factories than in equivalent situations in the South. Also, for many southern black migrants, a move north promised a rise in social status brought about not only through economics, but also through a sometimes inaccurate notion that race-based class and social mores were looser in the North. In many letters home, for example, recent migrants commented on coexisting with whites in relatively integrated circumstances.7 New York City was one of many northern destinations for southern workers, but was unlike other cities, such as Chicago and Detroit, where migrants lived in mostly isolated and segregated slum areas. Harlem, at least until the mid-1920s, boasted a fine housing stock, potential economic growth, and quick and easy public transportation. By 1920, diverse migrants from the South and the islands of the West Indies inhabited the area. Indeed, Harlem’s name

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“evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the country to its streets.”8 It drew unskilled laborers, intellectuals like Du Bois and Johnson, and artists like Claude McKay, Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, and James VanDerZee. It also became the home of a number of important political organizations, including the NAACP, the Urban League, and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). It is no surprise, therefore, that Harlem became the setting for the construction of a New Negro; it contained everything necessary for the creation of a modern black American.

A Home in Harlem: Developing Criteria for Black Art Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928)—written while its author was residing in Europe—describes the experiences of Jake, a soldier who returns to Harlem following his service in France during World War I. In one scene the young man and his girlfriend, Felice, take a break from a week of sequestered lovemaking to watch a movie at the local “Negro Picture Theater”: They went to the Negro Picture Theater and held each other’s hand, gazing in raptures at the crude pictures. It was odd that all these cinematic pictures about the blacks were a broad burlesque of their home and love life. These colored screen actors were all dressed up in expensive evening clothes, with automobiles, and menials, to imitate white society people. They laughed at themselves in such roles and the laughter was good on the screen. They pranced and grinned like good-nigger servants, who know that “mas’r” and “missus,” intent on being amused, are watching their antics from an upper window. It was quite a little funny and the audience enjoyed it. Maybe that was the stuff the Black Belt wanted.9

While the film is not identified, we can gather from McKay’s description that it is either a race film melodrama or a comedy featuring middle-class characters “dressed up in expensive evening clothes . . . to imitate white people.” The description of the film is curious: there is no doubt, for example, that the pair, along with the other audience members, enjoys the show. And yet, strikingly, McKay also suggests that the audience is conscious of the fiction and suspends a certain amount of disbelief in order to enjoy what they see. Jake and Felice, like others in the audience, are aware that what they are watching is a “broad burlesque” of black life; however, they laugh and enjoy the show. Like Fannie Hamilton in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods almost three decades earlier, the couple’s fraught, yet pleasurable, spectatorial experience displays an almost Du Boisian double consciousness. It is no surprise that McKay raised such issues in what is ultimately a brief aside near the end of a novel detailing Harlem life during the late 1920s. He, like

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many other artists at this time, had begun focusing on Harlem’s “underworld” elements: the lives and experiences of the working people in the city. Home to Harlem followed by a few years Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along (1921), McKay’s Harlem Shadows (1922), and Carl Van Vechten’s infamous Nigger Heaven (1926), and it appeared the same year as Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho, another novel featuring the experiences of the neighborhood’s common folk. McKay’s presentation of Harlem life was praised by many and criticized by many more, most notably by members of the African American intellectual elite, W.E.B. Du Bois among them, who took issue with what they argued were stereotypical versions of black life put on display for white readers.10 McKay would likely have anticipated such criticism: as a contributor for the Communist journal, the Liberator, he had “attacked the extreme conservatism of most black critics who often viewed black art simply as an extension of racial uplift efforts.”11 In this context, the narrator’s attitude toward black film in Home to Harlem is even more compelling and leads one to ask whether McKay is making fun of the audience’s ignorance, acknowledging its ability to laugh at itself, or suggesting the ridiculousness of the middle-class lifestyle presented on screen. Indeed, the scene prompts us to consider the film’s relationship to African American art at this time. The struggle to define criteria for African American art during the years of the Harlem Renaissance is well known, especially in relation to the tensions between Du Bois, editor of the Crisis magazine, Charles S. Johnson, who became editor of the National Urban League’s Opportunity magazine in 1923, and Alain Locke, coeditor (with Johnson) of the Harlem issue of Survey Graphic (1925). Under Du Bois’s leadership, the Crisis expanded from a political and sociological journal for the NAACP to include, from 1911 onward, fiction by African American authors (starting with poet Leslie Pinckney Hill’s “Jim Crow”). For Du Bois, “art— especially literature—[was] to be a vehicle for enunciating and effecting social, political, and economic ideas.”12 What was implied was art’s ability to inspire social change; however, Du Bois did not specifically call for an art of propaganda. In fact, in “Negro Art” (1921), he warned against just such a move, beginning with a critique of current aspirations: “We want everything that is said about us to tell of the best and highest and noblest in us. We insist that our Art and Propaganda be one. This is wrong and in the end it is harmful. We have a right, in our effort to get just treatment, to insist that we produce something of the best in human character and that it is unfair to judge us by our criminals and prostitutes. This is justifiable propaganda. On the other hand we face the Truth of Art. We have criminals and prostitutes, ignorant and debased elements just as all folk have. When the artist paints us he has a right to paint us whole and not ignore everything which is not as perfect as we would wish it to be.”13 Du Bois’s comments came early in the decade, and prior to the Civic Club dinner, an event considered to be one of the defining moments of Harlem Renaissance.

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Sponsored in 1924 by Opportunity, the Civic Club dinner was planned by Charles S. Johnson to showcase the talents of black artists and writers for a mixed-race group of intellectuals and politicians. The event emphasized what was already happening in the arts in Harlem, namely, that a number of talented and engaging writers were drawn to the neighborhood’s growing reputation as a center for African American politics and culture. The early part of the decade had witnessed the publication of McKay’s Harlem Shadows, Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Jessie Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924; Fauset, literary editor of The Crisis since 1919, was the guest of honor at the dinner), and Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint (1924). In theater, Sissle and Blake’s Shuffle Along (written and performed by African Americans) opened on Broadway in 1921 and Willis Richardson’s drama, The Chip Woman’s Fortune opened in 1923. Not long after, and inspired by the Civic Club event, the sociological journal, Survey Graphic, devoted a special issue to the neighborhood (the journal’s editor, Paul Kellogg, was an attendee). Edited by Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson, “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” combined historical accounts of the neighborhood; sociological appraisals of the area’s living conditions; poetry by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Angelina Grimké; and drawings of Harlem Types by Winold Reiss.14 That same year, and based on the popularity of the “Harlem” issue, Locke edited a book-length version of the journal, The New Negro: An Interpretation, which retained much of the original content with some notable additions, including the artwork of Aaron Douglas and Miguel Covarrubias, and a significant expansion of the creative section.15 The changes in title and contents suggest, according to Anne Elizabeth Carroll, that The New Negro was “an attempt to define a collective identity for African Americans,”16 to move it away from the localism of the Survey Graphic issue, and to offer, as Locke claims in the anthology’s foreword, selections “culled from the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance.”17 The changes also suggest a growing recognition of the importance of visual culture in the construction of the New Negro.18 David Levering Lewis, among others, has suggested that by the date of the Civic Club dinner, Du Bois was growing increasingly alienated from the political and aesthetic changes in Harlem. Lewis suggests that the dinner was “the sort of venture Du Bois himself might have been expected to have conceived,” but he was not even a part of its planning, because he was attending the Pan-African Congress and had been traveling in Europe and Africa for months beforehand.19 Additionally, the Crisis had been experiencing declining circulation, and Du Bois was under pressure to revamp the magazine. The NAACP’s board members believed that his other enterprises, including the Pan-African Congress and his well-known activities against Marcus Garvey, were drawing his attention from his editorial responsibilities.20 The fact that he was not involved in the

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Civic Club dinner suggests that Du Bois’s influence as “ ‘the leading literateur’ of the race,” was in decline by 1924.21 These issues aside, the major tension between Du Bois and Locke was based on their different opinions on the place of the arts in African American life. There are many theories regarding the source of Du Bois’s differences with Locke—the latter’s omission of Jesse Fauset in the Survey Graphic issue, Locke’s working relationship with Johnson, or Locke’s open homosexuality and the elder man’s homophobia—but what Du Bois openly objected to was Locke’s “idea that Beauty rather than Propaganda should be the object of Negro literature and art” despite his rejection of art solely as propaganda five years earlier. In what was ultimately a positive review of The New Negro, Du Bois voiced his concerns that Locke’s search for beauty might lead the “Negro Renaissance into decadence.”22 Du Bois’s response to Locke and others was twofold: in early 1926 the Crisis organized a “symposium” (a series of articles) titled “The Negro in Art,” with the intention of asking a group of leading artists and intellectuals to answer a series of seven questions about the role and responsibilities of literature in presenting black life to readers. Ultimately, the experiment failed because many of the respondents voiced little problem with a wide array of black representations, including those depicting poverty, vice, and sexuality. Most famously, Langston Hughes replied that “the true literary artist is going to write about what he chooses outside of opinions,” while Walter White argued that “genuine artists will write or paint or sing or sculpt whatever they please.”23 In short, a younger generation of black writers did not want to feel constrained by proscriptive aesthetic criteria, nor did they, as was Du Bois’s fear, feel as though they were pandering to the desires of white readers or patrons. That same year, Du Bois seemed to reverse his earlier oblique views on art and propaganda in a NAACP address. In “Criteria of Negro Art,” he laid out his most direct thoughts on the function of art for African Americans. For Du Bois, “all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. . . . I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”24 While he may have been railing against figures like Locke, whose emphasis on folk aesthetics in The New Negro seemed to give artists license to portray the more abject aspects of Harlem life, Du Bois was also responding to recent changes in the neighborhood and in Harlem arts and letters more generally. By the beginning of 1926, for example, Harlem was becoming a notorious playground for downtown, mostly white, socialites, artists, and intellectuals. The combined factors of organized crime, prohibition and bootlegging, and the influx of African American entertainers to the area resulted in a slew of club openings in the early 1920s, the most significant of which were Owney Madden’s Cotton Club in 1923 and Moe Gale’s Savoy Ballroom in 1926 (the former of which was closed to African American patrons). Furthermore, the more sordid elements of Harlem

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life began to appear in works by white writers, most infamously in Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, which was reviled by Du Bois but endorsed by figures like Langston Hughes (whose poetry appears in the novel), James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, Wallace Thurman, and Eric Walrond, among others. Additionally, younger writers such as Hughes, Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Zora Neale Hurston were increasingly vocal in their opposition to Du Bois’s definitions of the civic duty of the artist, publishing the short-lived journal Fire!! in 1926, which reflected the editors’ view that, in Thurman’s words, “All art no doubt is propaganda, but all propaganda is most certainly not art.”25 And where was film in this critical discourse? Certainly not in the pages of the Crisis, Opportunity, The New Negro, or even Fire!! In her important study of black film criticism during the first half of the twentieth century, Anna Everett argues that most writing on the cinema, at least until the end of the 1920s, appeared in the pages of black newspapers, such as New York Age or the Chicago Courier, or magazines like Half-Century and (briefly) Commentator, rather than on the pages of more explicitly political or literary publications. This suggests that while the Talented Tenth was concerned with defining, or at least outlining, a black political aesthetic (if you read Du Bois) or black aesthetics more broadly (if you read Locke, Thurman, or Hughes), their discussions did not extend to film, even though popular musical forms like jazz were beginning to be viewed with more respect.26 There are numerous reasons for this lacuna, some of which—for example, the cinema’s dual and dueling roots in science and popular entertainments—were identified in the preceding chapter. But, there seems to be a more fundamental reason for cinema’s exclusion from elite aesthetics: African American intellectuals and artists based their aesthetic judgments on white canonical norms and, therefore, did not consider film to be a legitimate art form.27 It was not as though there had been no precedent for the mixing of art and film. In France, for example, artists and intellectuals started experimenting with film in the early 1920s, most famously in the work of Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Germaine Dulac, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In these early experimental films we see the influence of Jazz Age aesthetics, specifically of African American cultural forms in, for instance, Jean Renoir’s Sur un air de Charleston (aka Charleston or Charleston Parade, 1927), a science fiction short featuring African American dancer, Johnny Huggins, teaching a “savage” white woman (Catherine Hessling) how to dance the Charleston. Closer to home in New York, white artists and writers were engaged in their own experimentations with the possibilities of filmic form. For example, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand produced Manhatta (1921), a combination of Sheeler and Strand’s photographic style and Walt Whitman’s poetry.28 Nevertheless, there’s no suggestion of similar collaborations among African American (or mixed groups of) print or photographic artists.

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The 1910s through the early 1930s also witnessed the publication of a number of texts engaged with identifying and defining an aesthetics or politics—or some combination thereof—of the cinema. Theorists were drawn from a number of disciplines, and included such thinkers and filmmakers as Hugo Münsterberg (psychology), Rudolf Arnheim (art historian), Vachel Lindsay (poet), Béla Belász (writer and poet), Louis Delluc (filmmaker and screenwriter), Germaine Dulac (filmmaker and screenwriter), Jean Epstein (filmmaker), Dziga Vertov (filmmaker), and Sergei Eisenstein (filmmaker). Many grappled with the question of film’s relationship to the arts, trying to define the cinema’s essential aesthetic components, and it was during the 1920s that film’s position as the seventh art, nationally and internationally, was determined. However, such theoretical exploration did not extend to African American aesthetics, not even those emanating from more decidedly experimental artists like R. Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman.29 The one exception was Zora Neale Hurston, who criticized figures like Du Bois for their rigid positions on aesthetics, along with black newspapers for what she saw as their pandering to the Hollywood studios. Hurston eventually made a series of short ethnographic films between 1927 and 1929, which accompanied her anthropological studies of the American South.30 But, as her use of the medium suggests, film was valued for its scientific properties not its aesthetic potential. During this time, African American film criticism in newspapers tended to fall into two categories: that which was concerned with finding accurate renderings of black life and that which supported African American involvement in the industry. According to Everett, “the writers in the late-teens and through the twenties first configure a celebratory discourse on the new independent black cinema movement and second advance toward more historical, philosophical, and self-reflexive examinations of the cinema and its utility in the New Negro ideology of racial and sociological transformation.”31 We can see the traces of cinema’s dual roots in the sciences (a photographic base that records a version of reality) and popular entertainments (narratives and performance styles with connections to the theater, especially vaudeville) in Everett’s breakdown. The newspapers “often, but not exclusively, approached fan news from a fan culture perspective,” a trait that would continue throughout the 1930s. Magazines, on the other hand, were committed to “impart[ing] a greater critical awareness of the cinema’s growing influence if the apparatus was to be enlisted successfully in the community’s struggle for a new politics of identity and sociocultural liberation.”32 While more popular organs (with working-class readerships) were acknowledging the appeal and the influence of the medium, more politically inclined publications (with middle-class readerships) were not. In such an environment, what were African American filmmakers to do?

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“Characters Typifying the Better Element of Negroes”: Early Film in Harlem Key events during the late 1910s and early 1920s had a lasting effect on attitudes toward film and filmmaking during the Harlem Renaissance and beyond: a determination, stretching back to the beginning of the twentieth century, to outline black people’s roles in a quickly modernizing and urbanizing nation; the function of the arts, particularly literature, painting, and sculpture, in these attempts to define and represent a “New Negro”; and film’s fraught roots in scientific discourses and popular entertainments. Early-twentieth-century political and intellectual leaders, many of whom resided in Harlem, looked to the arts to advance their cause of equality and respect. Film, which could have contributed to these efforts, was primarily overlooked or avoided, especially by a cultural elite who did not hold it in the same regard as the other arts. Harlem may have been a “promised land,” but independent black film companies that actually produced film were relatively few, and moving image representations of the area were just as rare. Even so, there were a few companies based in the neighborhood. While William Foster’s Foster Photoplay Company of Chicago (established in 1910) is considered to be the first black-owned film company, it was not long before businesses were established in other cities, New York included. In 1913, for example, the Afro-American Film Company was founded in New York by white investors, with African American businessman Hunter C. Haynes as head of production. Unlike Foster, we know very little of Haynes, the Afro-American Film Company, or his later company, the Haynes Photoplay Company (established in 1914). There are multiple reasons for this, including Foster’s gift for publicity and the lack of extant film texts from early black-owned companies (Foster’s included). And yet, even with limited resources—mostly reviews from black newspapers—Haynes serves as an illuminating case study of the trials and tribulations (business and aesthetic) faced by black film producers during the silent era. The Afro-American Film Company, like Foster’s Photoplay Company, initially produced short comedies featuring popular black vaudevillians, such as Charles H. Gilpin and Sarah Byrd, suggesting the strong links between the stage and the screen during this time in American cinema, when many short films were shown in vaudeville houses as part of larger revues. Unlike Foster’s, however, the Afro-American Film Company was white-owned, having been incorporated by “A. W. Burg, G. K. and F. A. Wade” for $10,000.33 Haynes was, in effect, the black face of the operation, and his overall role in the company’s decision making remains unclear. The company released two films in 1914, Lovie Joe’s Romance and One Large Evening. The latter is set in Harlem and is perhaps the first film featuring black characters (played by African American actors, not whites in blackface) set in

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the neighborhood.34 While Lester A. Walton initially gave the film a neutral review, Afro-American’s films soon became the focus of criticism. Lovie Joe’s Romance and One Large Evening were received poorly by “black theatre owners and managers [who] refused to book the films because they contained many of the same derogatory racial-stereotype characterizations of blacks in films released by the major companies.”35 Their refusal prompted Haynes to publish an appeal for increased community support for black films: “There has been so much trash put out by film companies representing the colored man . . . that it has almost disgusted him, and he is very suspicious when he sees a colored film advertised. But he can rest assured that any film advertised by the AfroAmerican Film Co. cannot but meet his approval.”36 Despite the fact that Haynes may have been acting as the owner’s spokesman, the black press treated him relatively gently. Walton, for example, observed that when “One Large Evening was shown at the Lafayette Theatre there were some who were disposed to criticize Hunter C. Haynes . . . for putting the picture on the market. But it is said that ‘his voice did not have any sound to it’ when the advisability of producing One Large Evening was discussed. . . . Perhaps it is the same old story—the colored man furnishing the idea, but shut out from partnership when the proposition materializes.”37 Shortly afterward, and perhaps owing to the criticism he received paired with a desire to make different films, Haynes left Afro-American and formed his own Harlem-based company, the Haynes Photoplay Company (located at 159 West 136th Street), which produced one fiction title, Uncle Remus’ First Visit to New York (1914), starring well-known stage performers (in keeping with the model already established by earlier film companies). Haynes also produced a newsreel focusing on elite blacks in New York and Boston, and featuring the popular boxers Sam Langford and Joe Walcott. Of these endeavors it was his nonfiction film that received the most positive reviews, including the claim that it was “by far the most meritorious picture of its kind ever thrown upon the screen,” by the New York Age.38 The responses to the Afro-American’s and the Haynes’s films indicate that black critics and audiences held high expectations for film—at least as an educational tool—even before D. W. Griffith’s notorious Birth of a Nation (1915) galvanized African American protests against demeaning film content. The tensions between fictional stories and nonfiction newsreels also suggests a reliance on cinematic verisimilitude. This was not only the case with responses to Haynes’s activities; a survey of the first few production companies in Harlem suggests that many were engaged in newsreel production (often focusing on local people and institutions, as Haynes’s nonfiction film did), the preferred form within which to represent the race. Between 1914 and 1925, for example, there were at least eight black-owned-and-operated film production companies in Harlem: Haynes Photoplay Company, Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange,

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The Downing Film Company, Colored Feature Photoplay, Inc., The Eureka Film Co., Inc., Seminole Film Producing Company, Micheaux Film Company, and the BEJAC Film Company—and one, The Frederick Douglass Film Company, in New Jersey. Of these, half were involved exclusively in newsreel production (Haynes, Toussaint, Downing, BEJAC, Douglass), two never produced a film (Colored, Eureka), and two were involved in the production of fiction films (Micheaux and Seminole). The community’s (or at least the middle-class segment of the community) reticence about fiction film is apparent in the critical reactions to newsreels versus fiction films, especially those that fell outside accepted uplift narratives. For example, while Walton was an early booster of black-owned production, distribution, and exhibition companies, having himself become a manager of the Lafayette Theatre in 1914 (shortly before it began regularly including films in its program), he was also an outspoken critic of racist depictions and would often use his column to critique films with demeaning content. As Alison Griffiths and James Latham note, Walton “actively promoted films which portrayed black people positively,” most often “singling out” nonfiction films, such as A Trip to Tuskegee, the first known black-produced documentary, and the controversial Johnson-Jeffries Fight, for his praise.39 As this preference for verisimilitude suggests, fiction filmmakers came under especially close scrutiny. It is not surprising, therefore, that the two fiction filmmakers in Harlem during this time, Peter P. Jones and Oscar Micheaux, received far more lukewarm critical responses; their films were not seen as being in keeping with the goals of uplift. Peter P. Jones, for example, was a Chicago-based commercial photographer who shifted into newsreel production sometime after 1914. He relocated to New York in 1915 and took a job at the Selznick Film Laboratories in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he quickly developed a reputation for being “the best motion picture ‘still’ photographer in the industry.”40 In 1922, Jones established the Seminole Film Producing Company on Seventh Avenue in Harlem and began production on a fiction film, Shadows and Sun, which was to feature Bessie Coleman, the first female African American pilot, in a story directed by Leigh Whipper (owner of Whipper’s Reel Negro News and, in 1922 the Leigh Whipper Film Company).41 The film was never made because Coleman, at the last minute, refused to appear in the role. The following year, Seminole produced How High Is Up?, a “two-reel comedy illustrating the efforts of [Arthur] Moss and [Edward] Frye, a well-known vaudeville comedy team, to fly an airplane.”42 A box office failure, the film raises the possibility that Coleman’s reluctance to appear in Shadows and Sun may have been due to her opposition to the film’s approach to its subject matter, which may have been recycled in some form in the later comedy. Furthermore, it supports the suggestion that black audiences were resistant to such content. Seminole Film Producing Company went out of business shortly thereafter.

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In 1920, another Chicago-based filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux, announced his decision to move his Micheaux Film Company to New York, citing the “better studio possibilities [and] the fact that the screen artists of the race are available in greater numbers in the big city.”43 By early 1921, when Micheaux opened his first office on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, his often-controversial reputation preceded him. In films such as The Homesteader (1919), Within Our Gates (1920), and The Brute (1920) Micheaux exposed negative aspects of black life—poverty, vice, and the hypocrisy of the black church—often suggesting that some elements of the black population were complicit (either consciously or unconsciously) in holding the race back. A successful entrepreneur whose films actually supported many of the assertions of uplift ideology—equality, ability, success—Micheaux nevertheless problematized more conventional uplift narratives by considering a wider array of controversial issues, including miscegenation, racial violence (lynching, rape), and the Ku Klux Klan. Generally, his films expanded beyond melodrama, the normative cinematic mode of uplift, toward westerns, political stories, or, especially during the sound era, urban crime narratives featuring whites as well as blacks (a rarity in race films, which almost always presented all-black worlds). As such, Micheaux’s films were less well received in the black press, as Walton’s observations of The Brute suggest: As I looked at the picture I was reminded of the attitude of the daily press, which magnifies our vices and minimizes our virtues. . . . With the advent of more race photoplays produced under the direction of Negroes, and with the popularity of these plays steadily increasing among Negroes in this and other countries, it is incumbent upon colored producers to set a high standard not only from the standpoint of photography and technical stage direction, but a determined effort must be made so that in the thematic construction of plays the Negro is given high ideals and types which he can emulate and of which he can feel justly proud. . . . [I]t therefore is the duty of our race producers to gladden our hearts and inspire us by presenting characters typifying the better element of Negroes.

For Walton, Micheaux’s film was “neither original nor any too pleasing to those of us who desire to see the better side of Negro life portrayed.”44 Walton’s response to Micheaux is curious, considering the latter’s consistent focus on uplift, ranging from stories about a black homesteader staking a claim in the Dakotas (The Homesteader) to a young, educated woman helping to educate her people in a rural southern school (Within Our Gates), to a handsome young doctor committed to the nation (Within Our Gates). For Micheaux, the cinema was a business, but it could also be used for education. Even more important, it could be an art. As early as 1919, for example, press releases for The Homesteader, Micheaux’s first film, proclaimed that every “[r]ace man and

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woman should cast aside their skepticism regarding the Negro’s ability as a picture star and go and see [the film], not only for the absorbing interest obtaining herein, but as an appreciation of those finer arts which no race can ignore.”45 Micheaux’s optimism about the medium fueled a decades-long filmmaking career dedicated to finding a position for black film in American theaters, often despite criticism. If any individual were to crack the wall separating film from the other arts, particularly literature, during the 1920s, it should have been Micheaux. A former Pullman porter, homesteader, and novelist, Micheaux initially wrote novel, and then film, narratives about ambitious and successful black men and women. From the very beginning, he cast performers associated with the Lafayette Theater (first in Chicago and then in New York), building a stock company of actors from the respected black stage and providing them with work and greater exposure on the screen (most famously, casting Paul Robeson in Body and Soul [1925], the young stage actor’s first screen role). Moreover, early on in his career, he announced his intentions to publish the Brotherhood, a journal “of finish and high aspiration” devoted to “race filmdom.”46 Micheaux’s move to Harlem in 1920 should have solidified his, or at least the medium’s, position in the area’s nascent arts scene. After all, black America’s best-known and most prolific film producer was moving to what was quickly becoming identified as the center of African American culture, and his desires to showcase this new art in visual and written form paralleled those of Locke, Johnson, and the young editors of Fire!! Nonetheless, Micheaux’s move did not change the black bourgeoisie’s attitude toward film. The reasons behind Micheaux’s marginalized status in relation to the artists and writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance are complex, and yet they indicate the ways in which black cultural producers during the 1920s also had specific parameters within which they viewed the arts. Micheaux, argues Clyde Taylor, was perhaps one of the most “literary” of the race film producers from this time, and yet his novels, according to Taylor, were “of poorer literary quality than those that marked the new notable successes.”47 Micheaux was a self-taught and self-published author, who sold his novels door-to-door, convincing his white rural neighbors to buy his melodramatic stories of passing and struggle on the Great Plains. Their style was more Victorian than modern, and their settings were predominantly rural. Furthermore, according to Taylor (quoting Carlton Moss), many of the authors associated with the Renaissance literary movement saw Micheaux as an “illiterate person” in comparison to the writers and intellectuals who became well known with the help of Du Bois, Locke, and journals like the Crisis and Opportunity—perhaps because he, unlike many of them, was not college-educated.48 While Taylor asserts that Micheaux’s absence from Harlem Renaissance histories was because the period was mainly a literary movement, there are

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other political and aesthetic reasons leading to the filmmaker’s exclusion. First, while Micheaux saw himself as a race man, his political affiliation was with Booker T. Washington rather than W.E.B. Du Bois. Many of his early films, such as The Homesteader and Symbol of the Unconquered (1921; Micheaux’s first film shot in the New York area) announced the filmmaker’s political leanings by including images of the elder statesman as part of the mise-en-scène. Also, the evils of urban living were a recurring theme in Micheaux’s films. Even when, as in Within Our Gates, the northern city is the source of the funding needed to keep a southern school in business, it is also the location of the more unsavory elements of black life. Second, Taylor argues that arbiters of taste during this time—Du Bois, Locke, Johnson, and others—derived their aesthetic assessments from European standards, which tended toward the highbrow rather than the popular.49 As this discussion has been suggesting, fictional race film movies in particular did not meet the criteria of respectable black art. Instead, they were made for a broader audience; one made up of working-class, often illiterate spectators, and drew on folk and vernacular aesthetics. Moreover, with few exceptions, many race films suffered aesthetically when compared with Hollywood films from the same time. Made on very low budgets, funds for costumes and sets were scarce (for example, Micheaux’s actors often wore their own clothes), and there was very little money for retakes. Additionally, a filmmaker like Micheaux was often forced by various state censorship boards to remove objectionable subject matter (ranging from lynching in Within Our Gates to images of crime and vice in other films) from his prints. Films were screened regularly in versions other than the original, with scenes either missing, cut apart, or reinserted out of their original order. Indeed, Micheaux’s films neither presented “Negroes typifying the better element” desired by Walton, nor did they do so with pretty pictures and seamless editing. As Jones and Micheaux’s experiences suggest, the African American community had high expectations for film as a business, as a tool for educating the masses, and as a modern technology through which to represent a New Negro. In fact, many critics, to repeat Walton, saw it as the filmmaker’s “duty to gladden our hearts and inspire us by presenting characters typifying the better element of Negroes.” While newsreels began showcasing the best of the race, fiction filmmakers faced a more difficult time when attempting to forge a viable industry that could speak to the experiences of their audiences, many of whom did not represent this better element. For producers like Micheaux, such an endeavor was fraught with obstacles, from funding to criticism from different sides of the political and racial spectrum. The question of black film representation would only become more complex with the development of sound technologies in the late 1920s. This, coupled with the area’s transformation during the Harlem Renaissance and the Depression, had a lasting effect on film content, especially that set in Harlem.

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Numbers Runners and New Negroes: Harlem in Sound-Era Race Film The transition to sound in 1927 had a significant impact on the race film industry. First, it resulted in a decrease in production during the early 1930s, a combined by-product of the increased financial burden required by new sound technologies and the overall economic consequences of the stock market crash of 1929, which had particularly severe effects on African American communities. Race film companies, already undercapitalized, either went bankrupt or, as in the case of Micheaux, began accepting the backing of white financiers. During this time, however, a number of mixed-race companies (often black talent and white money and technicians) were established, with the purpose of producing popular films for black audiences (continuing the practice of earlier companies such as Afro-American and Reol Productions).50 Most notable here were the producing pairs of Jack and Bert Goldberg and Harry M. and Leo Popkin. The Goldbergs were based in New York City and headed a number of companies that made race films throughout the 1930s and early ’40s. These included the Gold Talking Picture Company, Lincoln Pictures (not to be confused with George and Noble Johnson’s Lincoln Motion Picture Company), and Jubilee Pictures. The Popkins, based in Los Angeles, formed Million Dollar Productions in 1937 and, with actor/entertainer Ralph Cooper, specialized in gangster films, producing, according to Henry T. Sampson, some of the most “stylish black films” of the day (between 1937 and 1940).51 With sound technology the industry also shifted away from uplift melodramas and entered what some scholars have referred to as an “identity crisis, in which it struggled to redefine itself in the wake of economic, technological, and social changes.”52 By the mid-1930s, race film producers had abandoned, on the surface at least, uplift narratives and morality tales for the production of familiar, and popular, Hollywood genres: the musical, the comedy, the western, and the gangster/crime film. The primary purpose of such genre films was to entertain and to make a profit against the greater appeal of Hollywood releases.53 That they did so while making films that often incorporated uplift messages suggests the ways in which the conventions of recognizable genres, especially the gangster film, were marshaled to create a dialogue between African American politics and contemporary cultural concerns. The remainder of this chapter considers the following questions: Were black gangster films simple adaptations of white Hollywood formulas, or did they acknowledge conditions and experiences specific to their black urban audiences? And if the city is a primary determinant of the gangster film, then what role did Harlem, especially a Depression-era Harlem, play in the films? Warner Bros. introduced many of the genres that had the greatest effect on African American entertainers and audiences during the early sound era,

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especially the musical (The Jazz Singer, 1927) and the gangster film (Lights of New York, 1928). The former genre had an immediate impact in that it borrowed performance modes from vaudeville and the musical revue, especially blackface minstrelsy, and appropriated them for sound film. Between this penchant for the vaudeville stage and a belief in the harmony of African American voices, sound film inspired—with the help of a cabaret vogue already associated with Harlem’s cafés, clubs, and theaters—an almost immediate demand for African American singers and dancers.54 Hollywood studios, drawing performers from the Chitlin’ Circuit, siphoning off the race film industry’s talent, and capitalizing on the theatrical success of a number of Broadway musicals (such as Shuffle Along and The Green Pastures), produced short films and feature-length musicals with all-black casts, including Hearts in Dixie (1929), Hallelujah! (1929), and The Green Pastures (1936). During this time Hollywood also released a series of popular gangster films, including Little Caesar (Mervyn Leroy, 1931), The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931), and Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932). The early Hollywood gangster films are considered to be classics of the genre. Produced early in the sound era, they were products of a post-crash, reform-minded society focused on the salvation of individuals involved in alternative economies such as bootlegging, gambling, and racketeering during Prohibition. The gangster film drew from contemporary headlines, and many films loosely followed the life stories of larger-than-life criminal figures like Al Capone and John Dillinger, thus offering a “complicated interweaving of popular culture and social realities . . . [and] real and fictionalized gangster narratives.”55 Particular cinematic aesthetics supported this “interweaving”: urban settings, location shooting, and the sounds of the city (vernacular speech, automobiles, sirens, horns, gunfire). While the films neither featured black performers nor acknowledged an urban black presence, race film companies incorporated many of their conventions and some of their themes into black gangster films in the following years. That the gangster film is ultimately connected to the city is not a new observation; for example, Thomas Schatz suggests that the “city represented a complex, alienating, and overwhelming community that initially creates the gangster and eventually destroys him.”56 Nevertheless, the city occupies a much more complicated role in the gangster film that extends back to the genre’s silent period, an era marked by the interconnected factors of a massive growth of American cities, an increase in activities and membership of the Ku Klux Klan, Prohibition, and the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 that placed quotas on the number of foreign immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as Asia. According to Jonathan Munby, “To the representatives of a declining Anglo-Saxon Protestant order, gangsters had always embodied the twin threats of America’s arrival as a modern industrial nation. On one hand, they represented the forces of urban envelopment and the destruction of civic idealism.

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On the other, they testified to the radical demographic transformation of the American population.”57 The discussion of Fights of Nations (1907) and The Black Hand (1906) in the previous chapter suggests that such fears were already being articulated in early film. Munby’s consideration of the significance of urbanization and industrialization for the gangster film also is relevant to a discussion of black gangster films set in Harlem during the 1930s, especially if we remember that by the ’20s Harlem had become promised land, a Mecca for black rural migrants looking to escape the poverty and Jim Crow restrictions of the South. Harlem was the setting for scores of fiction (novels, short stories, poems, plays) and nonfiction (histories, sociological tracts) works, yet it was a minor component of the mise-en-scène in race films during the 1910s and ’20s, with the exception of One Large Evening and some newsreels. This situation did not change until the 1930s and the shift into genre production, a move that coincided with the post-crash effects of the Depression. With the transition into genre films, we see the “transfer from literature to films of the use of Harlem as a trope,” signifying African American modernity, urbanity, and possibility.58 As a city-based genre, the gangster film is situated in an identifiable urban space, commonly Chicago or New York. Black gangster films did this as well, though often much more explicitly, by calling out their settings in their titles: Harlem Is Heaven (1932), Murder in Harlem (1935), Dark Manhattan (1937), Moon over Harlem (1939), and Paradise in Harlem (1939) to name a few. This allusion to black America’s best-known urban space was an attempt to capitalize on Harlem’s vogue (and some filmmakers, such as Micheaux, retitled their films for southern audiences), a means of addressing its audience (many of whom were urban dwellers) in the present tense, and an acknowledgment of the area’s transformative potential and risk. Gangster films, with their focus on a protagonist’s rise through the ranks of organized crime, also presented a logical and inseparable relationship between urban space and character. The majority of Harlem gangster films were released in the late 1930s, suggesting a slight lag between the prototypical Hollywood gangster film and its African American adaptations; however, characteristics of the genre were visible in films as early as 1932, in Harlem Is Heaven (Irwin R. Franklyn), produced by Jack and Bert Goldberg’s Lincoln Pictures, and in a few films made by Oscar Micheaux.59 Harlem Is Heaven, for example, stars Bill “Bojangles” Robinson who, at this point in his career, was best known for his stage work, including roles in Broadway’s Blackbirds (1928–1929) and Brown Buddies (1930–1931), both popular music and comedy revues. The film’s narrative is roughly based on Robinson’s life, and he plays himself in the story. Robinson is the headliner for a musical revue who meets and falls for a young showgirl named Jean Stratton (Anise Boyer). Robinson’s friend, Chummy Walker (Henri Wessell), also falls for the girl, and the men have a falling out because of it. The situation becomes more complicated because the theater owner, Money Johnson (James Baskett), is also

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interested in Jean, and uses Chummy to front an illegal scheme involving a bogus hair-straightening machine. While Harlem Is Heaven contains multiple allusions to organized crime’s hold over the area, it is more of a revue film showcasing talents such as Robinson, Eubie Blake and his orchestra, the Cotton Club chorus, and other black entertainers (appearing, as the credits explain, “by special arrangement with The Cotton Club”). In this way it is, like many of the black genre films of the time, a hybrid; part musical, part gangster film, part morality tale. Black producers of race films chose genres “that were familiar and popular with black audiences in order to help guarantee investors a financial return,” but the films themselves, often thought to be “impoverished emulations of dominant cinema [also] proved to be significant venues for the showcasing of black revue talent in an age of decline for live black entertainment.”60 Much of this talent, for example Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, appeared in musical shorts made for jukeboxlike players intended to showcase both the talent of its stars and the technology. Often segments in feature films functioned in the same manner: as musical numbers disconnected from the narrative proper. In Harlem Is Heaven the musical interludes highlight Robinson’s dancing and singing talents, and function in a similar manner as the numbers in backstage musicals. Harlem Is Heaven performs an interesting balancing act between celebrating Harlem’s diversity and acknowledging its less savory components. These tensions are introduced in the film’s opening shots, which include stock footage of the area’s streets and people (notably, of the 369th Regiment and some protest marches similar to those discussed at the beginning of this chapter) and prologue text describing Harlem’s attractions: “all part of the throbbing, deafening crescendo that somehow blends harmoniously into the super-symphony that is HARLEM!,” and the “rat-a-tat of machine guns.”61 Because Bill’s and Jean’s success on the stage, however, is the main focus of the film (with Jean and Chummy’s romance serving as a secondary interest), little of the narrative is devoted to the inner workings of the gangsters in the neighborhood. Instead, criminal activities are pursued off screen, and like most gangster films, are communicated via newspaper headlines (here, the New York Amsterdam News). One scene, however, is illuminating for the way in which it suggests not only criminality, but also Harlemites’ vulnerability to graft. A little over halfway through Harlem Is Heaven Chummy visits Money Johnson. Money convinces the young man to act as his front man, selling shares in a company developing a “No Kink Hair Straightening” machine. The company is a scam, organized to make money from the community’s ignorance and internalized self-hatred. Chummy, blind to the ruse, agrees to the plan. But this is also where the gangster subplot becomes more interesting, because Money’s downfall is due not to gang violence but rather to the fact that he bilks the community. While the film focuses on Bill and Jean, it frequently references Money’s history of shady dealings; for

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FIGURE 10. Harlem!” in Harlem Is Heaven (Lincoln Pictures, 1932).

example, Chummy states repeatedly that he doesn’t want to get involved in one of Money’s “rackets.” At another time, Money references another scam he’s running and threatens a rival Harlem boss for “being behind the chiseling.” This subplot fades into the background, though there are spoken references to the rival boss, named “Moran,” throughout the remainder of the film. Ultimately, one of the victims of the straightening scheme, and not Moran, murders Money in revenge for the loss of his life savings. The film concludes with Jean and Chummy happily together as a couple, Bill having stepped aside upon realizing their attraction for each other. Harlem Is Heaven may not be an uplift tale, but it ends on a positive and moral note nonetheless: the bad guy is punished and innocent love blossoms. Oscar Micheaux’s films produced from the early-to-mid 1930s also exhibit an increased reliance on gangster conventions—and the more frequent use of Harlem as a cinematic trope.62 Of particular note here is Ten Minutes to Live (1932), Harlem after Midnight (1934), and Lem Hawkin’s Confession/Murder in Harlem (1935).63 With the transition to sound, Micheaux realized that he could capitalize on the appeal of Harlem’s nightlife, and he began to feature nightclub scenes in his films, even producing a revue film, Darktown Revue (1931), featuring veterans of the vaudeville stage. More often, however, Micheaux produced cinematic hybrids that combined music and dance revues within the conventions

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of the crime film. Ten Minutes to Live, for example, is a mystery about a woman who receives a note telling her she is about to die. The action is set in a Harlem cabaret, the Lybia Club, and the majority of the narrative is a series of song and dance routines by actual club performers (including a blackface comedy skit and a dance number set in the “jungle”). Harlem after Midnight is also set among the neighborhood’s cabarets and bars. It focuses on a detective (played by Micheaux) who helps find a young white (Jewish) woman who has been abducted by Harlem gangsters. Now lost, the film was promoted at the time as “the first all-colored gangster picture ever filmed,” suggesting the genre’s appeal for producers and audiences alike.64 Murder in Harlem also capitalizes on the appeal of cabaret performances and makes a number of allusions to organized crime (and other vices, such as drinking and gambling), to tell a melodramatic tale of a black man framed for the murder of a white woman. While more detective film than gangster film, Murder in Harlem’s focus on urban crime and other aspects of its production bear consideration. First, the film was a remake of The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921), Micheaux’s silent-era screen adaptation of the notorious murder of a young white factory worker named Mary Phagan in Atlanta in 1913. The accused murderer, factory-owner Leo Frank, was tried and found guilty on the basis of testimony given by the factory’s black night watchman. Frank, a Jewish northerner, was eventually kidnapped by the “Knights of Mary Phagan,” and lynched (an event commemorated in photographs and postcards). In both instances, the original and the remake, Micheaux changed the narrative so that an innocent African American worker was on trial for the murder. Additionally, Micheaux set the film in New York rather than Atlanta (although the first version no longer exists, reviews suggest it opened with an establishing shot of the New York City skyline). While the change in setting may have been a reflection of Micheaux’s immediate production circumstances, it enabled him to eliminate the regional conflict from the narrative and concentrate on other topics. Furthermore, by focusing the story on the wrongly accused night watchman, and a back-story involving the romance between the watchman’s sister and his lawyer, the director could recast “the case’s central tensions as those of race and class—across and on both sides of the color line, not North versus South.”65 The film was released as Lem Hawkin’s Confession in a few theaters in Harlem, and its complex narrative structure (dominated by flashbacks) was “lambasted” by critics.66 It was also criticized for its use of derogatory language, especially its inclusions of the word “nigger,” which is found in a note beside the dead woman’s body. Lou Layne, writing for the New York Age, for example, criticized the director for “poor judgment,” even though Micheaux took the text directly from news reports from the original crime.67 Furthermore, Micheaux’s inclusion of minstrel stereotypes in his characterization of Lem Hawkins, the

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white boss’s lackey, presented a less savory side of Harlem life than the better elements preferred by the bourgeoisie. Ultimately, the film, retitled as Murder in Harlem, enjoyed more success outside of New York, showing across the South, before screening in Los Angeles (the first of Micheaux’s films to be shown there). In the years immediately following the release of Harlem Is Heaven and the Micheaux films, two events changed Harlem: the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933 and the Harlem Riot of 1935. While the 1929 stock market crash had longlasting effects on a neighborhood and population already clinging to economic viability, the end of Prohibition in 1933 hastened the area’s descent. Throughout the 1920s and the early ’30s (the period roughly coinciding with the Harlem Renaissance), “gangsters financed 125th Street . . . [and] black revue theaters were primary outlets for the sale of illegal alcohol as glorified speakeasies.”68 Venues such as the Cotton Club were symbols of the New Negro and the Jazz Age, their legal business (entertainment) adding to the area’s vogue while their illegal business added to its coffers (of, at least, its white owners). In this light, Harlem Is Heaven is curious, for it acknowledges organized crime as the base of the black entertainment circuit while never questioning its legality. In fact, Bill and Chummy drink and dance without worry. But for Harlem, a “symbol of the Jazz Age,” the repeal of the Volstead Act had far-reaching effects on its economy and identity.69 The Harlem Riot of 1935 also had significant consequences for the neighborhood. On March 19, 1935, a young man was caught shoplifting at Kresge’s Department Store on 125th Street. A rumor quickly spread that he had been beaten and possibly murdered by police. Piqued by street-corner speakers (and possibly Communist Party organizers), and already dissatisfied with the neighborhood’s economic disparities and police brutality, residents rioted, resulting in the death of three people, injuries to more than two hundred, and property damage in the millions. While the rumors surrounding the boy’s beating were false, the violence was more a response to the rising Depression-era impoverishment of the neighborhood and a plethora of racial inequalities in hiring practices and public services such as policing, health, and education. In 1933, for example, Kresge’s, which served a predominantly black clientele, was the focus of neighborhood protests and picketing for its refusal to hire black employees. The most recent incident was the final straw and resulted in a “depression spasm, a Ghetto mutiny, a radical plot and dress rehearsal of proletarian revolution” (the final description an indication of the rising influence of the Communist Party, which was accused of fueling the flames of the riot in African American communities at this time). 70 Following the riot, New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia established a biracial commission to study the conditions in Harlem. Led by sociologist E. Franklin Frazer, the commission identified a litany of problems, including

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unemployment, substandard (and overpriced) housing, high rates of disease and infant mortality, and a general antagonism toward a violent police force. The report made specific recommendations to the mayor, which resulted in the city’s breaking ground on new housing, the Harlem River Houses, expanding the Harlem Hospital (especially its maternity wards), and announcing the plans to start construction on two new schools for the area. The actions taken on employment and police brutality were less immediate and much more lukewarm; for example, the commission suggested increased racial sensitivity training for the police. The overall effect of the report was to suggest that Harlem’s economic and social heyday either never fully existed or, as the problems suggest, was on the wane.

The Gangster Film in Depression-Era Harlem Harlem’s fall from “promised land” to ghetto was no better described than by Alain Locke, who in 1936 wrote: “Eleven brief years ago Harlem was full of the thrill and ferment of sudden progress and prosperity; and Survey Graphic sounded the tocsin of the emergence of a ‘new Negro’ and the onset of a ‘Negro renaissance.’ Today, with that same Harlem prostrate in the grip of the depression and throes of social unrest, we confront the sobering facts of a serious relapse and premature setback; indeed, find it hard to believe that the rosy enthusiasms and hopes of 1925 were more than bright illusions or a cruelly deceptive mirage.”71 Undoubtedly, the Harlem of 1935–1936 was not the same as that of 1925, but the problems outlined in the mayor’s report had not appeared overnight. In fact, for many familiar with the area, the extent of the problems had been known since at least 1929, when many Harlem residents either went on relief or became the beneficiaries of different charities. Between 1929 and 1933, for example, there was a 44 percent decrease in median black income, and an estimated 40 percent of Harlemites were on relief by 1933.72 Conditions were so bad that organized crime engaged in charitable activities; for example, the Cotton Club gave away three thousand food baskets on Christmas Eve in 1934, providing its owner, gangster Owney Madden, with some semblance of community goodwill.73 Perhaps more important, Madden’s gesture suggests the depths of the neighborhood’s economic nadir; even self-interested white gangsters— who normally sapped the area dry—saw the severity of the conditions years before the city government did. Harlem’s declining economic and social status also can be seen in Locke’s 1936 description of the area; “Harlem is racially significant as the Negro’s greatest and formerly most favorable urban concentration in America.”74 Locke’s description and lament points toward the twin roles that the area played in many of the black gangster films released later in the decade. On one hand, the use of the neighborhood in many of the films’ titles and as their location

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is suggestive of the area’s continuing significance for black and white audiences. On the other hand, Harlem’s Depression-era features instantiated a discourse on contemporary black urban living and the difficulties faced by many residents throughout the decade. Despite this, by 1937 Harlem had become the primary location for black gangster films, the city serving as a shorthand signifier for African American modernity, though one that differed from Du Bois’s and Locke’s earlier visions of Harlem. Although Harlem Is Heaven and other Harlem titles were produced in the early 1930s, the majority of black gangster films did not appear until the release of a group of mostly gangster and crime films made by Ralph Cooper and other West Coast filmmakers like the Popkins. The first film in this cluster, Cooper’s Dark Manhattan is also—with the possible exception of Micheaux’s Harlem after Midnight (1934)—the first true black gangster film in that its story of a small-time gangster rising through the ranks of organized crime adheres to the narrative conventions of earlier Hollywood films. Despite these similarities, Dark Manhattan provides a good example of the ways in which race film producers self-consciously adapted genre to address the experiences of their African American audiences. In doing so, they also authored a black urban aesthetics that differed greatly from the high art sensibilities supported by Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and other African American leaders and artists. Dark Manhattan was the brainchild of Cooper, its star, and his producing partner George Randol, who also served as the film’s screenwriter. Cooper was an entertainer, best known for his work as an actor, as a song-and-dance man, and as the emcee of the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night, which he founded in 1934. In the mid-1930s he moved to Hollywood and was initially contracted to choreograph routines and to appear opposite Shirley Temple in a number of films produced by Twentieth Century-Fox. When the job fell through, Cooper tried to interest the studios into making all-black films. Receiving no response, he joined with Randol and began to produce his own films. Randol was a veteran stage performer and had appeared on Broadway in both the original production and revival of Connelly’s The Green Pastures. One of the benefits of Cooper’s contract was that he trained at Fox’s film school and thus had a working knowledge of film form and structure. The partnership joined with Million Dollar Productions once it ran out of funds. The Popkins’ production company helped finance and distribute Dark Manhattan and worked with Cooper on two more gangster films, Bargain with Bullets (1937) and Gang War (1939), and a musical, The Duke Is Tops (1938), the latter starring Lena Horne in her screen debut. While Dark Manhattan is a West Coast production—and none of it was shot in Harlem—it possessed a distinctly Harlem cachet with the involvement of Cooper and Randol, especially the former, who brought his Apollo cool to the film’s story and style. For example, the film’s press releases announced that

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it was “the first all-colored motion picture with modern story, setting, and costumes.”75 While the existence of Harlem Is Heaven and other early crime films belie such a claim, the fact that the film’s modernity was not only linked to Harlem but also was used as a selling point suggests that, as with Hollywood gangster films, black gangster films were attractive because they addressed their audiences in the present tense, using urban sights and sounds to do so. Harlem Renaissance artists may have done the same, but much of their audience was white. For race film producers, however, the audience was presumed to be African American, which allowed a level of address and freedom of subject matter that eluded many a Renaissance writer. Dark Manhattan follows a simple narrative. L. B. Lee (Clarence Muse), a numbers kingpin, promotes Curly Thorpe (Cooper), a low-level gangster, up the ranks of his organization. Lee, despite his illegal activities, is a model businessman and, perhaps more important, a race man who brings jobs and opportunity to the community. Curly is from the wrong side of the tracks (the “jungle,” a neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, possibly the Tenderloin district), and, as is true of many gangsters, greed fuels his desire to climb the ladder of success, but eventually hubris stymies him.76 His downfall is the result of his overreaching: he moves too fast and he alienates too many people along the way. While Curly’s story adheres to the fates of many Hollywood gangsters (Tony Camonte in Howard Hawks’s Scarface, for example), there are ways in which Dark Manhattan breaks from the white gangster narrative. As mentioned, figures like Cooper and Randol infused the project with an urban, East Coast sophistication. The characters’ contemporary costuming, use of slang, and cabaret environs (featuring song and dance numbers), provide an immediacy to films like Dark Manhattan that were shot almost exclusively on a sound stage. The film’s Harlem setting, like the Banner Club in Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, is presented as a polyglot space that is full of promise if, of course, residents make the correct decisions: gangsters mingle with businessmen in the city’s streets and offices, and everyday folk mix with entertainers and other luminaries in the city’s cabarets. Moreover, the film’s title calls out a specific place to convey meaning to audiences. It acknowledges the enabling presence of Harlem: in its personnel, its narrative, its performance modes, its setting, and also for its audiences. The presentation of the specifics of black organized crime is another way in which the film utilizes, yet breaks with white Hollywood gangster film conventions. In Inventing the Public Enemy, historian David E. Ruth argues that during the late 1920s and early ’30s, one of the most significant developments in gangster films in general was the presentation of the gangster’s work environment. Early in the 1920s, for example, gangsters were (often ethnic) outsiders, marked by a disheveled appearance, “garish cheap clothes,” and surroundings that included “rough subterranean rooms . . . dirty, raucous saloons, and . . . dockyards

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and congested tenement districts.” Later in the decade, however, gangsters began to be depicted as “nattily dressed, office-using businessmen. Pleasantfeatured, they wore three-piece suits, ties, hats, and watch chains—a stylish version of standard middle-class business attire. Their offices covered the conventional range of business taste, from heavy Victorian probity to sleek Art Deco modernism.”77 In short, by the 1930s the gangster became a businessman, and gangs were presented as criminal syndicates with hierarchies of employees, offering, in their own ways, a critique of capitalism and American entrepreneurship. Dark Manhattan follows these recently established conventions. L. B. Lee’s operation is run as if it were a legitimate business, and Lee himself is a staid, middle-aged businessman whose understated suits and well-appointed offices (populated by secretaries and a variety of clerks) barely suggest his less savory business dealings. Where the film breaks with Ruth’s formula, however, is in Lee’s business: the numbers racket. Unlike Hollywood gangster films from the decade, which depicted bootlegging and racketeering, Dark Manhattan focuses on an activity that, while illegal, was “an integral part of the urban black experience and was understood more as a ‘business’ than racket.” Numbers bankers “were revered as proficient operators of a black-owned business in which all citizens had a stake.”78 They were, according to Claude McKay in Harlem Glory: A Fragment of Aframerican Life, “mystery men with a tremendous amount of respect, power, and money.”79 The film recognizes the status of the numbers racket, and its presentation of Lee and other numbers bankers acknowledges their position in the African American community, one that was familiar to the film’s audiences at the time. While Lee might be “the biggest numbers banker in Harlem,” he is by no means the only one. Curly takes over the business when Lee becomes ill, and he soon doubles the outfit’s earnings. He does so, however, at the expense of other bankers, all of whom are bonded through their membership in a banker’s association. The association is presented as a legitimate business organization (similar to a Rotary Club), and functions “as a metaphor for African American solidarity as a whole and as a reference to the history of black social movements [in general and] of the race man in particular.”80 This interpretation is not an exaggeration if one considers that, at this point, one of the best-known numbers kings in Harlem was Casper Holstein, a West Indian Harlemite who had been involved in the numbers since the 1920s. Holstein was a tremendously successful gangster who used much of his earnings to pursue philanthropic causes both in Harlem and in the West Indies. He also was an important patron of the arts during the Harlem Renaissance, funding a number of Opportunity magazine’s awards and describing himself in the same magazine as “a firm and enthusiastic believer in the creative genius of the Negro race.”81 Lee’s appearance and behavior is meant to loosely reference such figures as Holstein, who was widely known at this time by the film’s intended audience.

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FIGURE 11. L. B. Lee (Clarence Muse) and Curly (Ralph Cooper) address the Banker’s Association, Dark Manhattan (Million Dollar Productions, 1937).

The film’s nod toward such extradiegetic personalities and social issues is an example of the way in which black gangster films, while considered by many either to be pure entertainment or “impoverished emulations of dominant cinema,” dialogued with contemporary African American urban life and representation. Like earlier race film producers who made silent uplift films, Cooper was concerned with making pictures “that glorified blacks,” and in fact the film is dedicated to “the memories of R. B. [Richard Berry] Harrison, Bert Williams, Florence Mills and all of the pioneer negro actors who by their many sacrifices made this presentation possible.”82 Its neutral attitude toward the numbers racket, Lee’s characterization (played by Clarence Muse, a well-respected stage actor), and Curly’s comeuppance suggest that Cooper’s sense of glorifying blacks might not exactly fit W.E.B. Du Bois’s or Alain Locke’s descriptions of black achievement. And yet, in its suggestion that African American success comes through solidarity, the film articulates a politics of uplift while simultaneously expanding the term. Furthermore, it acknowledges the limited opportunities for many uneducated black urbanites, especially during the Depression years. Two years after Dark Manhattan, Meteor Film Productions of New York released Moon over Harlem (Edgar Ulmer, 1939), another black gangster film that

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intertwines urban crime with race politics.83 The film includes many now-familiar elements: a story of racketeers in Harlem extorting protection monies from neighborhood businesses, a love story between two young and promising adults, and cabaret scenes, showcasing performers such as Christopher Columbus and His Swing Band. The two subplots, the gangster and the love story, are connected through relationships among the characters: a middle-aged widow (Cora Green) marries a Harlem gangster named Dollar Bill (Buddy Harris). Her daughter, Sue (Izinetta Wilcox), is romantically involved with Bob (Earl Gough), a young political organizer from the neighborhood. The conflict arises when the gangster and love elements collide. Dollar Bill is attracted to Sue, and Bob is leading a neighborhood movement to encourage local businesses to resist paying protection monies. Like Dark Manhattan, Moon over Harlem is structured around the tension between the well-being of the whole community and the pursuit of individual gains. While this suggests important similarities between the messages of the two films, their differences offer more compelling insights into the development of the genre and changes in the community as a whole. First, unlike the former film, which was one of a number of race films that used the numbers racket as its subject, Moon over Harlem focuses on the protections racket and the extortion of money from small businesses in Harlem. Dan Burley, writing in the New York Amsterdam News in 1939, observed that the “story deviates from the overworked policy and numbers racket theme and takes instead the fascinating subject of white and colored hoodlums preying on the push cart peddlers in Harlem,” an observation reiterated two months later in another review of the film appearing in the same newspaper.84 Beyond moving away from a clichéd formula, this change associates black gangsters with activities that were much more detrimental to the community. Unlike L. B. Lee, who is a race man, Dollar Bill preys on the neighborhood’s small businesses. What is perhaps more important in Burley’s observation is that Moon over Harlem, unlike most race films from the time, acknowledges the influence of white organized crime in Harlem, a situation with which many viewers would have been familiar; for example, although black gangsters like Casper Holstein ran the Harlem numbers racket in the 1920s, by the early ’30s the area had been taken over by Dutch Schultz, who “consolidate[d] the fragmented numbers business … [and made it] a highly structured operation.”85 From the 1920s onward, white gangsters such as Joey Noe, Owney Madden, and Schultz were infamous figures both within and outside the neighborhood, but race films tended to present all-black worlds in order to avoid explicit interracial conflict; to do so would leave them open to criticism from community and church groups, and (from the early 1930s onward) the Production Code Administration. Moon over Harlem is an exception, even though its white gangster appears only briefly. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that he runs Harlem. In a scene early

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in the film, for example, he meets with Dollar Bill and voices his displeasure at receiving decreasing collection amounts. The boss is neither named (besides being referred to as “Boss”) nor identified (we only see him from behind), but his influence on the black gangsters in the neighborhood is clear because we see Dollar Bill, an influential man in other parts of his life, repeatedly take criticism and follow the boss’s orders. At one point, Dollar Bill comments on the relationship, only to complain that it is “just like slavery.” While Dollar Bill might be hurting the community, Moon over Harlem suggests that the larger culprit is white organized crime. During this scene about the collections amounts, we also learn of Bob’s mobilization of the area’s business owners against the protections racket. Bob is a young idealist who sees only the good in the neighborhood, a place he refers to as “Black Man’s Heaven!” Bob is a race man, a combination of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth (as are Sue and her friends, all of whom attend City College) and Alain Locke’s New Negro. Bob may also be “a sign of either the New Deal politics or Communist [discourses] prevailing at the time,” both of which had an appeal for African American audiences experiencing firsthand the effects of the Depression.86 He is a new character in sound-era race film: a man who articulates a political stance regarding life in Harlem (and, by extension, black urban life elsewhere) and who takes action to make change. Modern, educated, and engaged, Bob is a model of African American masculinity and a surprisingly late cinematic addition to New Negro discourses. Near the end of the film, a rival gang guns down Dollar Bill after one of his own men double-crosses him. Notably, Dollar Bill’s death is not at the hands of his white boss. Instead, his demise is meted by an organization from Detroit trying to muscle in on Bill’s territory. Perhaps the filmmakers felt that a white mobster killing a black gangster would be too unsettling with audiences for whom the effects of the Harlem riot of 1935 were still fresh. Or perhaps it was believed that the gang warfare would contribute an added element of excitement to the mostly secondary gangster subplot. Either way, Dollar Bill is punished for his behavior, and the film ends on a shot of Bob and Sue, looking out on a positive future in a Harlem of limitless possibilities. Bob observes, “There’s so much to be done here. It’s screaming for leadership.” And who, but Bob, is fit to lead Harlem? In this ending the film uses generic conventions as a vehicle to address contemporary concerns, and it directly articulates a position on politics in the black community. While the narrative expands genre, the film’s location points to another interesting development. Unlike the Cooper–Million Dollar Productions, which were shot in the Los Angeles area, Meteor Film Productions, described as “a Broadway concern” in the New York Amsterdam News, shot Moon over Harlem in Manhattan.87 Race film production companies were often shoestring concerns with little money for expensive costumes, sets, or locations. In fact, many of the

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films suffer in production quality, and their substandard sound, awkward editing, and stilted acting can be attributed to their paltry budgets. Black gangster films contained city references, but the majority of the films were set mostly in interior spaces—either sets or in actual clubs. The little of the cityscape that appeared in the films often consisted of stock footage of street scenes or nighttime shots of recognizable Harlem destinations, both of which had become cinematic clichés by this point. Dark Manhattan, for example, includes a few exterior shots that remain mostly unreadable (or appear to be shot on the West Coast). Moon over Harlem is not lacking street scenes, but rather than simply providing a tour of 125th Street’s more famous sights (the Apollo and the Savoy), the exteriors also include footage of the neighborhood’s everyday sights, including roof tops, tenements, and fire escapes. In one notable scene Bob and Sue sit in his car while they discuss neighborhood politics. In the distance we can see the New York skyline, with the Empire State Building recognizable in the background. In this one moment, as Bob talks about his dream to help hardworking black people and to improve the lives of people everywhere, we have a rare shot connecting the people of Harlem with the city at large, and a film that has often been mistaken as a mere entertainment vehicle dialogues with a much larger context. Moon over Harlem was one of a number of race films produced near the end of the decade that openly articulated a position on politics in the black community, using generic conventions as a vehicle to address contemporary concerns. Other examples from the time include Straight to Heaven (1939) and Gang Smashers (1939), both Million Dollar Productions (the latter scripted by Cooper) and Paradise in Harlem (1939), a Goldberg production (through Jubilee Pictures). The latter film, like the others, is a hybrid, focusing on an actor who witnesses a gangland murder and who must flee for his life. Eventually he returns to Harlem and, by becoming involved in a church production of Othello, finally transitions from blackface vaudeville performer to the dramatic stage, his stated desire throughout the narrative. All of these films possess similar characteristics: a Harlem location (with a few exteriors illustrating the setting), hybrid narratives (combining crime stories with other genres), and a focus on community uplift, often voiced through younger, politicized characters. A final way to understand the importance of the black gangster films’ culturally specific components is to consider a film in which they are not mobilized: Ralph Cooper’s last film with Million Dollar Productions, Gang War (1939). Of all the black gangster films from the decade, Gang War is a rare example of a film that relies solely on recognizable generic conventions and a charismatic star rather than a substantial plot. The story is about a battle between two gangs over control of Harlem’s jukebox machines. Killer Meade, played by Cooper, takes control of his gang early in the film (by murdering its leader, his former boss), and then sets his sights on a rival gang. The film is filled

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FIGURE 12. Bob (Earl Gough) and Sue (Izinetta Wilcox) overlooking New York City,

Moon over Harlem (Meteor Film Productions, 1939).

with gangster clichés from its very first title frames and, in fact, the narrative consists predominantly of gun battles, car chases, and montages of newspaper headlines. Here, and unlike in Dark Manhattan, Cooper plays an unredeemable and unsympathetic criminal who dies in the end for his crimes. The film’s banal familiarities can be traced to a couple of possible factors. For instance, they may be signs of Cooper’s growing impatience with playing a gangster. In fact, after Gang War he appeared in only one more film, Am I Guilty? (Supreme Pictures Corporation, Samuel Newfield, 1940), in which he broke type by playing a doctor.88 Perhaps Gang War’s formulaic and uninflected diegesis is a reflection of the race film companies’ increasingly desperate attempts to maintain their economic viability at a time when Hollywood films were drawing their base audiences away; for example, Jesse Zunser, writing in 1940, noted that the main obstacle for race films was “the audiences’ awareness of the higher standards of the usual Hollywood product . . . [and that audiences were] apt to judge Negro films by the same standards.”89 Whatever the causes, by abandoning discourses of African American solidarity—the defining difference between black and Hollywood gangster films—Gang War became what many black gangster films were already accused of being: a black version of a white genre film.

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Young Men with Cameras: Film Production in Harlem and the End of the Race-Film Era After experiencing a high point in the late 1930s and early ’40s, race film production started to ebb, the combined result of a reduction in raw film stock brought on by World War II, black audiences’ growing preference for Hollywood’s more polished production values (for example, in 1943 Hollywood released both Vincente Minnelli’s Cabin in the Sky and Andrew L. Stone’s Stormy Weather), the studios’ increased casting of African American stage and screen performers, and less interest in what was seen, as suggested by Dan Burley’s comments regarding Gang War, in the gangster film’s clichés. In Harlem, other factors contributed to the decrease in film production, especially the devastating effects of another riot in 1943, continuing economic disparities in the community (despite the Mayor’s Commission efforts from the preceding decade), and changes in the ways in which the neighborhood was being presented in literature, film, and other media. Nevertheless, newsreels and photography from this time continued to have an impact on African American filmmaking in Harlem during the remainder of the decade, especially the work of photographers Morgan and Marvin Smith, and newsreel producers Edward W. Lewis and William Alexander. One of the effects of photography and motion pictures between World Wars I and II was the increased visibility of an urban black population in ever more familiar places like Harlem. Starting with early newsreel footage of parades and other street scenes, and extending into the street photographs included in Locke’s Harlem issue of Survey Graphic, we see the development of a photojournalistic style that began to capture people on the move. Growing out of sociological and political roots (such as Survey Graphic’s readership of social workers), nonfiction forms became the preferred means by which the black bourgeoisie chose to represent itself, a fact supported by the critical response to race films and Hollywood films with African American personnel. In each case, positive depictions were commended while negative stereotypes were condemned. Although the years surrounding the Harlem Renaissance are often associated with the portraiture of James VanDerZee or James Latimer Allen, the period following the stock market crash is best captured in the work of the twin brothers Morgan and Marvin Smith. During the 1930s, a number of technical advances in photography, particularly the development of the Speed Graphic and the 35mm Leica cameras, enabled photographers to take to the streets with lighter and more portable cameras. Accordingly, and in connection with New Deal policies that gave rise to photographic organizations like the Photo League of New York, a new genre of “urban street photography” took root. While the Smiths were not affiliated with the Photo League, they, particularly Morgan, “virtually invented a modern photojournalist practice through their photographs

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taken for the black press.”90 Starting in 1934, Morgan contributed photographs to the New York Amsterdam News, eventually joining the newspaper as its staff photographer in 1937. In 1942, he began working for the People’s Voice, a newspaper established by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and initially managed by St. Clair Bourne. Morgan Smith’s work marked a move away from the use of formally composed portraits in newspapers like the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age. His street scenes were an editorial change for the newspaper, whose editors began to see the importance of photojournalism in their mission. Even so, the editors continued to be “intent upon showing Harlem as a Mecca for social life and entertainment,” often overlooking the Depression conditions, which increasingly crippled the neighborhood.91 Despite this, Smith managed to capture the various faces of the area, through everyday scenes of kids at play, street-corner orators, and soldiers embarking for the war. He also documented Harlem’s elite and forged bonds with boxer Joe Louis and his wife Marva, and, perhaps most significantly, with Rev. Powell, for whom Morgan captured different aspects of Harlem’s political life, including antilynching and equal employment demonstrations. Portrait photographers as well, the Smiths photographed many of Harlem’s political, social, and intellectual elite, including Carter G. Woodson, Augusta Savage, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes, among others. At the same time that the Smiths were documenting Harlem street life, another photojournalist, Edward W. Lewis, broke through race barriers— throughout the 1930s white media was closed to black journalists—when he was hired as a staff photographer for the New York Daily News, having begun his journalism career as a cub photographer for the New York Amsterdam News while still in high school. Like the Smiths, Lewis’s job with the paper gave him the opportunity to photograph eminent people, including Charles Lindbergh, Bruno Hauptmann, and the funeral of Dutch Schultz.92 Unlike the Smiths, however, Lewis soon moved into newsreel production, establishing Edward Lewis Productions in 1939. Lewis intended to produce a series of films that, according to a press notice from the New York Amsterdam News, would function as “a sort of Negro ‘March of Time,’” by cataloguing achievements of the race.93 In his first year of operation, Lewis produced twelve shorts, split between two series, Colored Champions of Sport and Colored America on Parade, distributed by Million Dollar Pictures. The shorts were often coupled with a main feature; for example, Lewis’s “Brown Bomber” accompanied the Million Dollar’s crime feature, Straight to Heaven (Arthur H. Leonard, 1939) at Harlem’s RKO-Regent Theater in November 1939. Lewis also made another film, Life in Harlem, but very little is known about it, except that it was produced sometime between 1939 and 1940. Lewis’s films, which no longer survive, adhered to the uplift ideology still popular among Harlem’s elite and reflected in its newspapers during the 1930s

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and early ’40s. Lewis was committed to producing and exhibiting images of black achievement, including, in his own words, “outstanding Negro sculptors and artists and other Negroes who are tops in achievement in America.” For this, the New York Amsterdam News credited Lewis with having “intelligence and grit and courage,” and equated his ambition with that of such leaders as “the Booker T. Washingtons [and] the George Washington Carvers,” among others.94 The continuing preference for cinematic verisimilitude via nonfiction film can be seen in the differing critical responses to Ralph Cooper’s Dark Manhattan and those received by Lewis and other newsreel producers from the same time period. Cooper was a neighborhood local, and as such the newspapers fully covered Dark Manhattan, from announcing its premiere at the Apollo Theatre a month beforehand to reviewing the film upon release, but the coverage often criticized the type of films Cooper made. For example, a review titled “Dark Manhattan Is Gangster Film, But Symbolic of Progress” devotes most of the article to a critical examination of the film’s plot and performances, disparaging, like many reviews, Cleo Herndon’s stiff performance. Nevertheless, in the last paragraph, it finds something to commend: “despite all these well-intentioned criticisms, the reviewer honestly believes that in this latest of Negro cast pictures a long step has been taken and commendable progress has been made. It smacks less of the amateur production and more nearly approaches the brilliant films released by the powerful film studios of Hollywood. . . . [D]ark Manhattan and dark America may well be proud of this latest cinematic creation which stands as a symbol for greater achievement of Negroes and the silver screen.”95 This treatment stands in contrast to the much more detailed articles introducing the work of Edward Lewis, who received at least one very positive feature in the New York Amsterdam News and another in the Baltimore Afro-American. Other nonfiction film producers encountered similar coverage; for example, Richard Lawrence of Lawrence Talking Pictures (established 1939) received a spread in the New York Amsterdam News in 1941. Lawrence, whose company produced shorts documenting the activities of black churches in Boston and New York (the company was based in Boston but had an agent in New York), along with travelogues and educational films, is presented as a true race man, who “has some pretty definite ideas about the educational value of the motion picture as it effects the lives of Negroes in this country.” Lawrence, echoing uplift discourses from decades before, is quoted as believing that “the only way we could offset such propaganda [as Birth of a Nation] would be by producing pictures showing Negroes in their true light.”96 In other words, black filmmakers were still expected to make propaganda according to Du Bois’s criteria, and film continued to be infused with the power to capture a larger truth. By the early 1940s, the nation was gearing up for World War II, and while the production of films for black audiences did not completely cease, there were very few titles released between 1942 and 1945. During the war, a number of

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future filmmakers received their training (mostly journalistic) under the auspices of the Office of War Information. In particular, William Alexander, began in the OWI by writing news releases for black newspapers. Alexander and others assigned to “boosting Negro morale,” formed a production company, the All American Newsreel Company, with the intention of making films about the war that showcased the efforts of minority soldiers and other workers.97 In all, the unit made more than 250 newsreels, many of which were advertised in black newspapers and shown throughout the country. The black press received the series enthusiastically, with papers such as the New York Amsterdam News referring to All American’s first segment as “probably the most significant motion picture news item for Negroes since the invention of the motion picture camera.”98 Hyperbole aside, the response to All American’s efforts show a continuing enthusiasm in the black press for uplifting images of black men and women. Once home from the war, Alexander continued his efforts by moving to Harlem, where he founded the Associated Film Producers of Negro Motion Pictures in 1945. Alexander’s company released a few feature-length films, including Call to Duty in 1946 before moving to London at the end of the decade. Besides Associated Film Producers, the only other race film companies to survive in New York City after the war were mixed-race producers (though they weren’t located in Harlem): Astor Pictures, which produced a series of late musical comedies like Tall, Tan, and Terrific (1946) and Reet, Petite, and Gone (1947), and Jack Goldberg’s Herald Pictures, which produced a series of race films, including the musicals Sepia Cinderella (1947) and Miracle in Harlem (1948), perhaps the last all-black crime drama set in Harlem during this time.99 From the 1910s to the ’40s, the African American political, intellectual, and artistic elite engaged in a project of redefining and representing the race. This time period coincided with some of the most fruitful moments in Harlem’s political, social, and cultural history as it transformed from a northern suburb for middle-class whites to a bustling “Mecca of the New Negro,” a place that symbolized the ascendance of the modern, urban African American. However, even during the heights of the Harlem Renaissance, when black aesthetics were being vigorously questioned and redefined through prose, verse, theater, and the visual arts, the cinema remained captive to its dueling roots in science and popular amusements. While we see a transition in African American photography from type studies and formal portraiture to a more dynamic form of urban photojournalism, film struggled with the black bourgeoisie’s preference for verisimilitude and uplift. Through all this, the idea that film could confront caricature and reshape common (white) misconceptions about Harlem’s black population continued.

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Delinquents in the Making Harlem’s Representational Turn toward “Marketable Shock”

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive. —James Baldwin, “The Harlem Ghetto”

A series of three photographs sets the tone for the following exploration of Harlem in visual and written texts from the 1940s through the early 1960s. The first image is a much-reproduced portrait of three black male youths, standing side-by-side on a Harlem street, wearing top hats and tails. The subjects look directly at the viewer, asserting their agency and offering a multivalent and overdetermined performance of identity. The image is ironic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the formal composition of its subject and the almost insouciant look shared by the young men, all of whom, like the photographer, remain anonymous. Their bodies and the setting suggest black male urbanity, while their outfits gesture toward the costumes and performance modes of the Harlem Renaissance, and even further back to uniforms often associated with domestic service (via the plantation) and resuscitated in blackface minstrelsy and Hollywood film. This first picture, however, serves as an establishing shot for a more disturbing narrative, one that shares with the best Hollywood films an inciting incident, a conflict, and a resolution (that may or may not be happy). The second photograph involves a subject, youths dressed in evening wear, but key changes have occurred. First, the image has become a snapshot of figures in action rather than the formal poses of the earlier image. Second, two of the young men have disappeared. Even in the absence of his compatriots, however, the remaining youth (who may or may not be part of the original group) is again a member of a trio: he’s partnered with two uniformed white police officers, billy clubs in hand, who are in the process of taking him out of a police cruiser. 88

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FIGURE 13. Boys wearing looted formal wear, Harlem riot, August 1943. ©Corbis

Images.

The youth, clad in top hat and tails, continues to glance at us, but his expression has changed: his brash insouciance has been replaced with a look of consternation, a direct response to his changing circumstances. The final photograph offers either narrative resolution or uncertainty, in which the same police officers from the previous image lead the young man into a Harlem precinct house. While the composition of this photo is more open than the preceding two, the placement of the figures suggests a continuation of

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FIGURE 14. Young black man in police custody, Harlem riot, August 1943.

©Corbis Images.

the confinement from the previous photo. The now visibly upset young man is framed again by the police officers, and one has a firm grasp on his sleeve, the officer’s light hand offset by the darkness of the youth’s evening attire. Perhaps even more disturbing than the boy’s distressed look may be the smiling expressions of the police officers and the onlookers, all of whom are white. The power has shifted, and what began as a narrative of youthful misdemeanor has echoes of a lynching party. Although this series of images could be easily read as a metaphor for African American urban experience over the first half of the twentieth century in that it encapsulates the celebration and the containment of black people in the city, it specifically represents the events of August 1–2, 1943. During this forty-eight-hour period, Harlem erupted at rumors that a black soldier had been shot and killed at the hands of a white police officer while defending a woman in the Hotel Braddock on 125th Street. It was true that Officer James Collins shot the soldier, Robert Bandy; however, Bandy was not mortally wounded. Still, word of his violent demise quickly spread throughout the neighborhood, and a “large crowd began to assemble at the headquarters of the 28th police precinct [the same precinct where the young man in tails would later be led], at the Braddock Hotel, and a Sydenham Hospital. Police units were quickly assigned to disperse

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FIGURE 15. Young man led into police precinct, Harlem riot, August 1943. Original

image, UPI.

the gatherings and dispel the false rumors, but as one crowd scattered, another formed elsewhere. At one point three thousand people congregated outside the 28th precinct headquarters, threatening the officer responsible for Bandy’s alleged death.”1 Acts of public protest turned into vandalism as people began breaking windows. The tensions spread throughout the neighborhood, and vandalism soon became looting, with the majority of the destruction and theft

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directed toward white-owned businesses. While the events were relatively short-lived, with order returning to the neighborhood by early Sunday, the results were disastrous: by the morning of August 2, six people were dead, hundreds more were injured or arrested, and property damage was estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and community leaders were quick to stress that the events in Harlem were not a “race riot,” but were, in fact, the acts of a few “hoodlums and criminals” rather than the neighborhood’s law-abiding citizens.2 Nevertheless, this distinction did not erase the very real tensions leading to the outburst, many of which had been present for years. An unidentified writer for the New York Amsterdam News, for example, opined a week later that Harlem is a most unfortunate community. . . As part of a great city that has always had to keep up its front, Harlem has sung and danced when it should have been working and praying. In the late nineteen twenties and the very early thirties, novelists, poets, newspaper columnists and producers combined to portray Harlem as Negro Heaven. . . It’s time now for Harlem to quit kidding itself. . . . Harlem has never lived up to its reputation abroad. Not even in the days of the “golden era,” sometimes called the “renaissance,” was Harlem on sound economic or political footing. Harlem is, and has been for years, in a bad way. It has refused to face the facts.3

While the editorial’s title, “Harlem Must Share the Blame,” exhorts the neighborhood’s residents to take some responsibility for the violence (the newspaper continuing to reflect the ideology of the black bourgeoisie), it nonetheless points to the larger prevailing issue of growing economic and political displacement, especially during the war years. It also ironically underlines the tragedy of the performance of the three youths in the photographs. Dressed to sing and dance—like much of Harlem in Renaissance mythology—they ended up either absent from the frame or put behind bars, again out of sight. Harlem was hit particularly hard during the Depression years, when it experienced high unemployment, deep poverty, increased crime, overpriced and inadequate housing, and substandard health care.4 Following the riot of 1935— sparked by another case of police violence against the neighborhood’s black residents—Mayor La Guardia, Governor Herbert H. Lehman, and (indirectly) President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to ameliorate some of the area’s more egregious problems through the construction of public housing units (the Harlem River Houses in 1937 and the East River Houses in 1941), schools, and the expansion of the Harlem Hospital. However, until 1943, when the increased presence of the war industries and their desegregation in 1942 brought some economic relief to African American workers (particularly in the shipyards of Brooklyn and New Jersey), unemployment continued to be a serious problem

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among Harlem’s adults, a result of continuing job discrimination in both the private and the public sectors. The nation’s entrance into World War II inspired a new round of selfevaluation in black urban communities (many of which were exploding with a fresh generation of southern migrants), and with it a new level of African American protests against job, housing, and social discrimination. Before 1941, African American support of the war effort was lukewarm at best, an attitude that was influenced by the chronic job discrimination blacks faced in the armed forces and the defense industry, along with continuing racial violence and segregation, especially in the nation’s southern states. The popular national rhetoric geared toward fighting fascism was eventually incorporated into civil rights discourses by black leaders who mounted a “Double-V” campaign, with the dual goals of achieving victory over the Axis powers abroad and over racial discrimination at home. In such an environment, African American involvement in the war effort—as soldiers, as workers, or as citizens facing rationing and other deprivations—became a twofold concern; to show one’s patriotism and to achieve racial equality by the end of the war. Newsreels and nonfiction films like The Negro Soldier (Stuart Heisler, 1944) supported such endeavors. The latter, for example, was an orientation film for soldiers produced by Frank Capra for the War Department Information and Education Division and written by Carlton Moss, a little-known actor (he appeared in Oscar Micheaux’s 1934 gangster film, Harlem after Midnight).5 Moss, recommended for the job by Vincente Minnelli, replaced the film’s original writer, playwright Marc Connelly of The Green Pastures, when the army deemed the latter’s script “too stereotypical.”6 The film, a combination of fictional footage of a church congregation (featuring Moss as the minister) and newsreel and documentary footage from a variety of sources, including America (D. W. Griffith, 1924), The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924), and Olympia (Leni Reifenstahl, 1938), also included scenes of troops shot on location in France before its release in January 1944. While The Negro Soldier was not a direct response to any specific instances of violence, it nonetheless suggested a growing institutional awareness of unrest in the African American community. The film brought together two important modes of thought. On the one hand, it suggested a change, albeit glacial, in Hollywood’s depiction of African Americans, spurred along by the NAACP’s Walter White, who was unrelenting in his pressure on the industry. On the other hand, the film illustrated the continuing belief among black and white reformers that African American life should be presented in nonfictional form, even when the documentary was mostly a docudrama. Here, we see the influence of the army’s use of the film for educational and propaganda purposes. Moreover, the Information and Education division had a strong connection to the social sciences: Frederick Osborn, a member of the Social Science Research

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Council and an author of a study on eugenics, was its director. With a general belief that film could be used to increase morale, The Negro Soldier was released by the War Department in early 1944. While it was initially shown to black and white recruits, it was released (with some changes) for public exhibition later in the year.7 The intent and content of The Negro Soldier could not have been further from that of the images introducing this section. In the photographs we see moments of domestic conflict as urban unrest led to violent upheaval and social containment. In the film, footage of African American soldiers abroad, far from Harlem’s streets, denotes patriotism and national unity. What connects the two examples, however, is the way in which such often-conflicting images of African American life suggest a continuing desire to shape African American citizenship via visual and moving media. By the early 1960s, images of violence, destruction, poverty, and decay, the advent of another war, and another wave of urban uprisings would overshadow moments of heroism so that Harlem would become an even more overdetermined political and aesthetic site.

How the Other Half Lives? Harlem as Photo-Text, Harlem as Sociological Subject While photographic documents of the Harlem Renaissance are most closely associated with the more celebratory work of James VanDerZee or Morgan and Marvin Smith, the economic collapse of the 1930s brought a new approach to urban photography, one that would change the look of Harlem from Jazz Age modernism to Depression-era poverty, decay, and criminality.8 Initially aided by Roosevelt’s New Deal social policies, which sent photographers as part of the Farm Security Administration’s “historical unit” and writers representing the Federal Writers’ Project across the United States to document the words and images of American life, the documentary photograph soon found new outlets in a number of popular magazines, like Life (established in 1936), which featured photographic essays of various subjects (many of which were drawn from the Farm Security Administration archives). The dust bowl images of Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange often define the genre; however, some photographers—either associated with the FSA, like Helen Levitt, or the New York Photo League, such as Aaron Siskind—also captured pictures of American urban life. Many focused on Harlem and were interested in the neighborhood “as a site of encounter, an emblem of the challenge of representing American modernity,” as well as “a site that afforded charged visual opportunities, spectacles, evidence, found objects, and decisive moments.”9 The still images of Harlem thus contribute to a number of convergent and contradictory political and aesthetic discourses— urbanism, documentary, visuality—that were also central issues in African

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American filmmaking over the next few decades. In what follows I consider the rise of the photo-text in conjunction with the appearance of independent film production in the neighborhood, particularly the collaboration of Helen Levitt, James Agee, and Sidney Meyers on The Quiet One (1948) and Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World (1963). The immediate popularity of photo magazines like Life and Look (established in 1937), suggests the extent of public interest in mass-market photojournalism; however, it was the success of Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces in 1937 that provided a “model (and anti-model) for a spate of photo-text books featuring images.”10 The book, a combination of Bourke-White’s photos and Caldwell’s words documenting the faces and the experiences of rural southerners (both black and white), was the inspiration for a number of similar projects including, most famously, Walker Evans and James Agee’s collaboration, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, begun in 1936 and published in 1941. The Evans-Agee collaboration, like that of BourkeWhite and Caldwell, focused on rural farm workers, but their subject was limited to three families of white sharecroppers rather than the multiplicity of southerners (black and white, men and women) that populated the earlier text. New York was a primary location for photographers and writers, especially those interested in Harlem and the state of the nation’s African American population, for which the neighborhood stood as a central metaphor. During the 1930s, for example, Aaron Siskind and members of the New York Photo League, a self-taught, left-leaning photography collective, began work on “Harlem Document,” a study of Harlem’s people, places, and institutions. The group was approached by Michael Carter, an African American sociologist with an interest in detailing social conditions in the neighborhood. Carter, in reality a journalist named Martin Smith, planned to write accompanying text for the photos.11 The project, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, produced hundreds of images but never resulted in a book. Rather, it morphed into three iterations: short spreads in Fortune (1939) and Look (1940) magazines featuring Carter’s descriptions of the neighborhood and a longer version (with fifty-two images) titled Harlem Document, Photographs 1932–1940: Aaron Siskind, published in 1981 (edited by writer Ann Banks). The later version eliminates Carter’s contribution and instead pairs images with text transcribed from oral histories recorded by writers for the Federal Writer’s Project in 1939 (some of which were gathered by Ralph Ellison). The photo essays that appeared in Fortune and Look were similar to New Deal photo-text and expository documentary conventions of the time, in which subjects are often presented with explanatory text, resulting in features that combine the aesthetics of photography with the legitimacy of the social sciences. Like Bourke-White’s and Evans’s images of rural southerners, the photo spreads presented black urban poverty to a mainstream, mostly white

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readership. The Fortune article, for example, appeared in an issue devoted to the New York World’s Fair that was intended to introduce the city to readers. The edition’s “Harlem” section is a little over three pages long and consists of eight images taken by Photo League members (credited to Siskind, Hansel Mieth, and Wendell MacRae) and uncredited text offering a third-person introduction to Harlem’s people, institutions, and landscape. The text describes a Harlem of “poverty, squalor, and doubt,” in which unemployment is rampant and living conditions are substandard.12 At the same time, it also claims the neighborhood to be “the cosmopolis of the Negro world . . . in fact, the only Negro cosmopolis.”13 The editors provide an overview of the neighborhood’s diversity—of people, of religions, of occupations—while also covering the area’s social clubs and other forms of entertainment (both legitimate and illegal). Ironically, considering their source in a magazine devoted to images, the photographs are secondary in importance. Their function is evidentiary; they are there to “provide a factual ‘truth’ that illustrates the quantitative, statistical documentation provided in the commentary,”14 a truth that documents despair while nonetheless managing to include more sensational content. The Look feature, “244,000 Native Sons,” appearing almost a year later, resembles the earlier article in the tone of its text and its photographic subject matter (the former mostly written by and credited to Carter and the latter credited to the Photo League). As its title suggests, the article was influenced by the recent publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which the magazine’s editors describe as “the most effective blow struck for Negroes since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”15 Taking its inspiration from Wright’s novel, especially its description of African American urban life that left victims like Bigger Thomas in its wake, the Look spread “presents . . . the story of Harlem, Negro capital of America” as a case study for the “essentials of Negro existence in any American city—whether it be New York City or Native Son’s South Chicago.”16 The text, like the earlier Fortune piece, thus acknowledges Harlem’s status as the “Negro capital of America” and its privileged place in black America. Carter’s text, like that in the Fortune spread, introduces the neighborhood through facts and figures, most of which are geared toward exposing the area’s overcrowding, disease, and poverty, and underscoring “New York’s special and sulfurous version of the Negro problem.”17 And while the description of the neighborhood’s vexed status is drawn from the Fortune feature, the Look piece is intended for a similar readership, one that is made up of “socially minded American[s].”18 The spread itself is separated into different themes: housing, youth, health, religion, and work. Each consists of brief text by Carter and photos that supply supporting evidence toward his claims. For example, the two-page section on the “Harlem Home,” accompanies a small photo of an apartment described with the word “squalor” and another larger photograph of numerous apartment dwellers on fire escapes, watching a passing parade.19 This

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latter image is used to illustrate the conditions of overcrowding, and yet its subject, a parade, actually underscores the neighborhood’s vitality, as people line the streets and the fire escapes to watch a positive event; in this instance, members of the local chapter of the Elks club parading down the street. Most of the text and photo combinations continue along a similar route, with the images often acquiring meaning when paired with Carter’s words (the photos were not taken with specific text in mind). Another section is particularly interesting in this regard because it combines text titled “Harlem Delinquents in the Making,” with images of children (all male) playing in Harlem’s streets and boarded up buildings.20 While the text’s intention is to influence the “socially minded American [to] contemplate” the effects of the substandard living conditions in Harlem on its residents (disease, infant mortality, delinquency), it just as often overdetermines the impact of the images. For example, one (uncredited) photo of five young boys, some who appear unhappy or sullen and some who are smiling, is titled “Five Social Problems.” The text continues, “These are typical Harlem boys,” and then describes the horrendous conditions they endure—high infant mortality and disease, low test results in school, and no place to play— before suggesting pessimistically that “they will probably be living within Harlem’s boundaries for the rest of their lives.”21 The section continues with a description of Harlem’s crime, while the visuals focus on black male youth. The overall effect of the combination of text and image is to visually and authoritatively (the text acting as voice-over narration in a documentary film) underscore the delinquency of black men, even though none of the accompanying images present criminal behavior. The photo, for example, is a medium shot of five boys, sitting in a line along what appears to be a banister outside a building. Each boy is clean and neatly dressed (though one has a tear in the knee of his pants). As mentioned, their facial expressions range from smiles to sullen frowns. The fact is that they are “typical Harlem boys,” but by introducing them as social problems, the text reinterprets their quotidianness as something sinister. In fact, the combination of image and text suggests that black male youth embody the area’s problems. In effect, the “problem” of the color line so famously described by W.E.B. Du Bois has been redefined and re-presented as the problem of black male youth. Such photo-text combinations thus beg the following questions: What was the effect of the text on such images? And to what extent does the “nonfiction” text overdetermine the image; making it, in effect, stand in for African American urban reality?

Twelve Million Pictures: Black Authors and the Photo-Text The photo essay’s uneasy relationship with the moving image makes it an integral component of this discussion of Harlem and African American

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FIGURE 16. Five Social Problems, in “240,000 Native Sons,” Look, May 21, 1940. The caption reads: “These are typical Harlem boys. They have survived Harlem's infant mortality threat which kills one out of every 20 in early childhood. They go to one of Harlem's 23 schools, where according to teachers, their aptitude varies directly with their health. They play in Harlem's streets which have the highest accident rate in the city (there are few playgrounds, only one Y.M.C.A.). They don't know that they will probably be living within Harlem's boundaries for the rest of their lives.”

visuality. The juxtaposition of image with words results in a style akin to Sergei Eisenstein’s “Theory of Dialectical Montage” (which was circulating in art and political circles throughout the 1930s). But the photo-text offers more than a mere, somewhat trite, analogy to montage aesthetics, for its struggles with the presumed indexicality of the photographic image, along with its selfconsciousness about the voice mirrors the continuing debates among African American artists and intellectuals over who could speak for black experience— a struggle at the very heart of moving image production. It is no surprise, therefore, that some of the most outspoken African American critics of Hollywood, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes, were drawn to the photo-text, and their choice of subjects and approach to the genre reveals much about the historical moments in which they were working. During the late 1930s, for example, Richard Wright lived in Harlem and worked for the Daily Worker, which often published Photo League photographs. At roughly the same time, and as part of his work for the Federal Writers’ Project, Wright contributed text to the WPA Guide to New York, where his writing was paired with images by Berenice Abbott and others.22 Additionally, during the early 1940s Wright was interested in publishing a photo-text about

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Harlem’s black youth, a planned collaboration with photographer Helen Levitt (later one of the writers and cinematographers of The Quiet One) that never materialized. In 1941, Wright was approached by Viking Press (based on the success of Native Son) to contribute the accompanying text for a selection of photographs from the FSA archives. The resulting book, 12 Million Black Voices, was intended to be an illustrated history of the African American in the United States, from slavery, through Emancipation, the migration to northern cities, and contemporary urban living. Wright worked with Edwin Rosskam, a FSA photographer and photo editor, who was charged with choosing the images from the archives. While Rosskam is credited with selecting and editing the images in 12 Million Voices, there’s no doubt that Wright, with such an interest in the image, collaborated with the photographer/editor, even accompanying him on a trip to the archives in Chicago. The resultant text has been extensively studied by scholars, who have alternately criticized it for offering a homogenous version of black working-class life—one inflected, especially, by recent sociological theories on urbanism and the ghetto by scholars such as Louis Wirth and Robert Park (and already voiced by Carter’s contributions to the photo-text genre)—or praised for challenging “visual and racial expectation”23 through its juxtaposition of image and text.24 It is true that 12 Million Voices self-consciously engages with image production through language and the organization of image and text. Early in the book, for example, Wright acknowledges that to “paint the picture of how we live on the tobacco, cane, rice, and cotton plantations is to compete with mighty artists: the movies, the radio, the newspapers, the magazines, and even the Church. They have painted one picture [of life in the South] . . . but we live another.”25 Wright’s words not only draw attention to his own project of image making (itself an interesting rhetorical strategy), but they also identify the mass-mediated aspect of such production. For Wright, the idyllic South (in this context) can be seen and heard in a variety of media, and by the time 12 Million Voices was published, the most common Hollywood representation of African American life—if it can even be called such—was found in popular all-black musicals set in idealized southern settings, such as The Green Pastures (Marc Connelly and William Keighley, 1936), or in southern melodramas like Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939). The text’s design is equally self-conscious. The images and words do not simply coexist. Nor does the latter overdetermine the former. Often photos appear opposite each other, sometimes with or without accompanying text. Sometimes images bleed off the edges of the page, and sometimes, particularly at the beginning of new sections, text is superimposed over images. The words describe movement—from Africa to the United States and from the rural South to the urban North—and the placement of the images contributes to this sense

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of mobility: often they appear opposite each other, one at the top of the page, the other at the bottom (and then vice versa), as if mimicking the movement of a train. Other times, particularly in images of social abjection or unrest, the photos appear at the tops of the pages, with text pulled out below. The spreads function as a pause, a scene break of sorts, which also emphasize certain dilemmas in African American life: drought and rural peonage in the South and the loss of social cohesion and the poverty of living conditions in the North. The overall effect of this interplay between text and image, from content to graphic effects on the page, is highly cinematic, with a documentary style akin to Dziga Vertov’s montage and collage aesthetics in his kinoglaz and kinopravda films. Wright was not the only author to produce or attempt to produce a photo-text of African American life—or, more specifically, of life in Harlem (though 12 Million Voices, it should be noted, includes photographs taken throughout the United States). For example, in the mid-1940s James Baldwin proposed a collaboration with his childhood friend, photographer Richard Avedon, on a project called “Harlem Doorways.” The unrealized project was to be a “photo-text study of the streetscape of [Baldwin’s] native grounds.” Between 1947 and 1948, Baldwin collaborated with Theodore Pelatowski on “The Blood of a Dying Lamb,” a photo study of Harlem’s storefront churches. This work also was never published; however, it contributed to Baldwin’s receipt of a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1948. Baldwin did not return to the photo-text genre until 1964, when he collaborated again with Avedon (who, by this time, had shifted from documentary to fashion photography) to produce Nothing Personal, a large-format art book synthesizing elements of Avedon’s iconic portraiture with Baldwin’s almost stream-of-consciousness observations about American life. While it combines images with text, Nothing Personal breaks from the WPAinfluenced photo-text in two significant ways: first, Avedon’s subjects are a mixture of recognizable personalities from politics, science, and the arts and unknown individuals who are sometimes, but not always, named. The portraits’ aesthetics also differ from FSA photography. Often people are shot in close proximity, with their bodies and heads taking up the majority of the frame. Backgrounds are predominantly empty and figures appear almost as if they are cut outs placed in front of a white wall (or with backgrounds that have been burned from the frame). Clearly, place is not central to Avedon’s concerns. Instead, we are encouraged to study his subjects’ faces. Baldwin’s text, which is, as mentioned, almost stream-of-consciousness and autobiographical, also breaks with earlier photo-text conventions. The majority of the writing does not correspond to the images, and words often appear on separate pages from photographs. Moreover, Baldwin’s ruminations on the United States do not immediately read as an examination of American

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race relations. That his observations have anything to do with race surfaces gradually. In section 2, for example, Baldwin recollects a time when he and a white male friend were almost arrested for being a mixed race pair and, presumably, up to no good. This is the first moment when Baldwin discusses his race, and race more generally, and he does so in order to examine America’s racial attitudes: “He [the police officer] was now confused, afraid, and apologetic, which caused me to despise him from the bottom of my heart. He said— how many times have I heard it!—that there had been a call out to pick up two guys who looked just like us. White and black, you mean?”26 The following portraits are more politically pointed; for example, an extreme close-up of a black fist (identified as belonging to Joe Louis) is followed by portraits (in closeup) of two black students, two images of George Wallace, and then one each of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Malcolm X, Lana Turner’s daughter, Martin Luther King Jr.’s son, and William Casby (“born in slavery”). The combination of text and photographs provides a commentary on American history and, more specifically, on contemporary race relations. Ralph Ellison, a professional photographer prior to publishing Invisible Man (1952), was also drawn to the genre. In the late 1940s, for instance, Ellison worked with photographer Gordon Parks Sr. on a photo-essay on Harlem. Titled “Harlem Is Nowhere,” the project was never published as a photo-text. Ellison’s essay, however, was eventually published in Shadow and Act, his collection of nonfiction essays from 1964. The text of “Harlem Is Nowhere” provides us with an idea of the scope of the proposed project: written after World War II and the Harlem Riot of 1943, Ellison describes the “psychological character” of the neighborhood as a nightmarish version of the Du Boisian concept of twoness: “The resulting clash of cultural factors within the Negro personality account for some of the extreme contrasts found in Harlem, for both its negative and its positive characteristics. For if Harlem is the scene of the folk-Negro’s death agony, it is also the setting of his transcendence.”27 For Ellison, Harlem’s living conditions result not only in these contradictions, but also in a sense of alienation and displacement in which “one ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze.”28 Even though “Harlem Is Nowhere” is unfinished, the project remains compelling because of the individuals involved and its timing. First, “Harlem Is Nowhere” was begun prior to the publication of Ellison’s exploration and exhortation on African American visuality, Invisible Man, and some of the themes regarding the psychic effects of African American existence can be seen clearly in the earlier nonfiction piece. Additionally, Parks’s involvement is an additional note: the photographer moved to Harlem in the mid-1940s and was employed shooting fashion spreads for magazines like Vogue at this time. He was also shooting documentary content as well, and it was this output, in particular a 1948 photo-essay on a Harlem street gang, that earned him a

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position on the staff of Life, where he worked as a photographer and writer for the next two decades.29 I will return to this feature later in this discussion. Lastly, Langston Hughes was also drawn to the photo-text genre during his career, starting, perhaps, with his friendship with Henri Cartier-Bresson in the 1930s and culminating in the publication of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a short story set to photos shot by African American photographer Roy DeCarava, in 1955.30 The Sweet Flypaper of Life, unlike the Baldwin and Ellison projects—which, whether published or not, relied on collaboration between writer and photographer—departs from photo-text conventions in a number of ways, and these departures actually align it more closely with Harlem filmmaking from the time. First, the text is a fictional story, told in the first-person by “Sister Mary Bradley,” who introduces us to her family and shares her ruminations on life in Harlem. Through Sister Mary’s words we gain insight into the political and social changes that she, and the neighborhood, have experienced, and the difference between her life and that of her children and grandchildren. The text is paired with photos taken by DeCarava over the previous five-year period. DeCarava, originally a painter and a printmaker, moved into photography in the late 1940s, when he began taking photographs of the neighborhood. The images that appear in Flypaper were not taken specifically for the book; nonetheless their inclusion gives the reader an insider’s impression of Harlem (both Hughes and DeCarava were Harlemites with extensive knowledge of the area), especially when combined with Hughes’s words. The pair also took a different visual approach from many of their predecessors, who most often presented Harlem—and black cityspaces more generally— as a ghetto (as per the convention of most FSA photography). Instead, Flypaper is more hopeful about life in the neighborhood, an optimism fueled by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education the preceding year and cited by Sister Mary as her reason for putting off death for a few more years: “Sister Mary said [to the Lord’s messenger] that she wanted to find out how integration was going to work on earth first.”31 In the Hughes-DeCarava collaboration, therefore, Harlem returns to its roots as a promised land. Why were Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and Hughes drawn to the photo-text when they also had access to the moving image? Each writer, reflecting the belief of the African American intellectuals and artists more broadly, had an ambivalence toward and fascination with Hollywood, and each had some interaction with film over the course of his career. In 1932, for example, Hughes accompanied a group of African American intellectuals to Moscow to participate in “Black and White,” a Soviet film project about African American life. The project never materialized, but Hughes stayed in the USSR for a year and wrote a number of dispatches about his experiences. Later, he collaborated with Clarence Muse on the screenplay for Way Down South (1939), an antebellum musical/melodrama, which also featured music by the cowriters (they were also

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credited with at least one song for Stormy Weather a few years later). Hughes was unhappy with the studio’s demands, particularly RKO’s desire to create an antebellum paradise consisting of contented slaves and benevolent masters (this was not an exclusive desire of RKO, as many studios were making musicals and melodramas with similar settings following the massive success of Gone with the Wind in 1939). While the experience left Hughes wary of Hollywood, he attempted a few more film projects, including one based on his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and another collaboration with Clarence Muse (an adaptation of St. Louis Woman).32 In 1943, Hughes published an essay, “Is Hollywood Fair to Negroes?,” in which he railed against Hollywood’s representation of African American characters, encouraging black performers to avoid stereotypical roles by stressing the power of the moving image in myth making: “The motion picture is and has always been one of the greatest propaganda and educational mediums in the world. And that millions of people take what they see on the screen to be an approximate representation of contemporary life in America— which is why so many otherwise uninformed people all over the earth think so disparagingly of the American Negro—because they see him on the screen—the only place they see him—always so stupidly portrayed—and portrayed by Negroes.”33 For Hughes, the danger of film, particularly when produced by Hollywood, was that it encouraged spectators to mistake fiction for reality, an effect that made the “screen so dangerously harmful to the colored people.”34 Richard Wright also was drawn to Hollywood at roughly the same time as Hughes. Even before Native Son was adapted for the screen in 1951, the author wrote at least two (un-filmed) screenplays, Melody Limited (1944), about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and The Last Flight, a story “loosely based on the later political adventures

of

poet

Ezra

Pound.”35

Native Son

was

adapted

for

the

theater in the early 1940s (where it was famously staged by Orson Welles), and later in the decade Wright received a number of requests to rework the novel for film. He rejected the offers because of what he saw as the producers’ insistence on “overaccomodations to the public taste,” which included changing Bigger Thomas into an ethnic white character.36 Wright instead chose to make the film himself, and he worked with French director Pierre Chenal on the screenplay (having purchased the rights for the stage adaptation from Orson Welles, John Houseman, and Paul Green). The resultant film, a poorly received and executed low-budget coproduction by Wright, Chenal, and an Argentinean company named Sono Films, starred the author and was primarily shot in Buenos Aires (with some exteriors shot in Chicago). Despite the film’s negative reviews and minimal box office, Wright began work on two more film projects, neither of which he completed.37 James Baldwin had his own well-documented fascinations and frustrations with Hollywood, most famously when he went to Los Angeles to adapt Alex

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Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X in the late 1960s (a few years after the publication of Nothing Personal). In The Devil Finds Work (1976), Baldwin ruminates on his relationship with Hollywood. In an oft-cited section near the beginning of the text, the author reminisces about the importance of film in shaping his imagination and providing an “entrance into the cinema of my mind.” Through considerations of figures like Bette Davis, Sylvia Sidney, and Joan Crawford Baldwin examined his difference—as an ugly boy with buggy eyes, a “strange” boy in the eyes of his mother and others in the community, and as a “nigger” in America—suggesting the medium’s transformational capacities.38 The next section continues with Baldwin’s memories, and it functions, through his discussion of films like The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) and In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967), as a disquisition on film and reality as related to African American representation. Whereas the preceding section focused on the imaginative potential of the cinematic, the second section reminds readers that “a black man . . . had certainly best not believe everything he sees in the movies,” a warning similar to Hughes’s.39 This last observation is put to the test the final section of The Devil Finds Work, in which Baldwin describes his trip to Hollywood, one made against the protests of his friends and family and that he subsequently referred to as his “Hollywood sentence.” In a brief discussion, Baldwin relates his experience of attempting to adapt Haley’s text for a Hollywood studio determined to present Malcolm X’s life as one in which he “had been mistreated, early, by some whites, and betrayed (later) by many blacks.”40 Such political boundaries had aesthetic implications as well—for example, Arnold Perl was brought in by the producers to assist Baldwin in the technical aspects of adaptation. Perl took Baldwin’s scenes and reinterpreted them according to Hollywood conventions, shifting from both Haley’s and Baldwin’s text and incorporating the generic clichés of the action film.41 The project was never completed, and Baldwin eventually left Hollywood, publishing his version of the screenplay as One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1972). Despite what Baldwin described as a “painful adventure,”42 his relationship to the moving image remains compelling, especially because he “did not envision a Black Hollywood film as an endpoint. Instead, Baldwin remembered his childhood fascination with the seductive power of filmic identification and combined that with his distrust of a Hollywood complicit in promulgating the stories of race Baldwin spent his life unraveling and challenging. Baldwin looked to film itself as an opportunity to use the visual medium to enact a selfquestioning placement of the viewer within a not-settled—and never to be settled—history that failed if it became a static binary or an easy teleology.”43 While he never attempted another screenplay, Baldwin had a fascination with African American representation throughout his career, and he was one of the

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few writers of his generation who seemed to believe that the problems inherent in the medium were not insurmountable. Ralph Ellison had fewer direct interactions with Hollywood. Nonetheless, he was outspoken in his thoughts on film’s relationship to African American aesthetics. In “The Shadow and Act,” for example, the author examines the role of film in the construction of American racial mythology, opining in a section on The Birth of a Nation that “in the struggle against Negro freedom, motion pictures have been one of the strongest instruments for justifying some white Americans’ anti-Negro attitudes and practices,” asserting, as had others before (and since), film’s power in manufacturing hate.44 Like Baldwin, however, Ellison expands his discussion beyond viewing Hollywood as the primary producer of racial caricature and stereotype, famously arguing that “to direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be to confuse portrayal with action, image with reality. . . . The anti-Negro image is thus a ritual object of which Hollywood is not the creator, but the manipulator.” Ellison’s assertion that “in the beginning was not the shadow, but the act”45 reinterprets the racism that has been assumed as an a priori element of film technology and shifts culpability onto the industry itself for repeating already inscribed racial representations. Moreover, his observations—like Hughes and Baldwin—exhort his readers to avoid confusing the diegesis with reality. While each of the authors had something to say about the cinema, they limited their considerations to narrative film, particularly those indebted to Hollywood financing and conventions. This is surprising, given their (particularly Hughes’s) interest in experimentation with form as a means of presenting an African American point of view. It is just as surprising that each of the authors was comfortable with the production of images, as the discussion of their experiments with the photo-text and with Hollywood screenwriting suggest (and in Wright’s case, he was heavily involved in a film that was made outside the parameters of Hollywood and the United States). Could it be, then, that such culturally and aesthetically important African American artists, despite their experimentation with the written word, were bound to mimetic and evidentiary roots of film; the documentary photograph? And does this suggest an ongoing tension between fiction film (represented by Hollywood first) and nonfiction? If so, then it provides a clue to the direction that films focusing on African American urban spaces, particularly those set in Harlem, would take at midcentury. The first stage in this process, however, would be to animate the photo-text.

The Quiet One: The Photo-Text Starts Moving From the 1930s through the ’50s the photo-text, more than any other medium, presented Harlem as a “set of representational possibilities, both visual and

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literary.”46 As I suggest, the neighborhood’s best and brightest were drawn to the genre, as a means of extending their interest in African American selfdefinition and visibility from the word to the image. And while each of these writers was outspoken in his opinions of Hollywood, none attempted to animate the genre. It took Helen Levitt, a photographer and Richard Wright’s friend, to begin the process of locomotion. Levitt was a self-taught photographer who had worked on WPA arts projects and with the New York Photo League. In the mid-1930s, she embarked on a project photographing children at play in the streets of Central and East Harlem. It was this work, shown in the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, which brought her to Wright’s attention. For Wright, “Levitt’s Harlem work insistently evaded doctrinaire readings of poverty and delinquency, framing the ghetto street as a site of dynamic social interaction, agency, and expressive power.”47 The photos feature groups of children of different races playing in the neighborhood. Others detail children’s chalk drawings, some of which appear on the street, sidewalks, or walls. The framing, especially of the children, is often open, suggesting the dynamic movement of street life and offering an alternative to the versions of Harlem youth presented by the Look spread a few years earlier. The images, however, do not shy away from detailing conditions in the neighborhood; often children play in empty lots, on piles of rubble, or near gutters clogged with rubbish. And yet, the images seem less concerned with documenting venality than with celebrating the children. Considering the aesthetic and social environment in which she was working—where the still and moving image and fiction and nonfiction modes were increasingly mixing—it seems almost natural that Levitt would expand to filmmaking, and by the early 1940s, she was supporting herself as a film editor (including work for Luis Buñuel). Her first film, the sixteen-minute In the Street (shot between 1945 and 1946, but not released until 1948), can be described as the moving image sequel to her “Photographs of Children” exhibition at MoMA. Working with James Agee, who is credited with the script, Levitt shot footage of children at play in the streets of East Harlem, a mixed neighborhood of Italian American, African American, and Puerto Rican residents.48 In the Street is a short, almost silent film. Agee’s script is minimal, his presence best felt in the film’s opening epigraph, which claims that one wanders the city’s streets, “unaware and unnoticed, every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer: and in his innocent artistry he projects, against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence.” While ostensibly detailing children’s different activities, including dressing in costumes and staging play battles, Agee’s words reflect a lyricism and humanism that extend beyond documentary reportage (aesthetically, though, they gesture toward the American documentary movement of the 1930s). Such poeticism is further

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supported by images that detail children playing, dancing, parading, and battling. The footage, while based on actual events (and captured with handheld cameras), also has an experimental quality to it, leading some scholars to comment on the more “bizarre” elements of the text. Juan Antonio Suárez Sánchez, for example, argues that the scenes of children in costumes (including black children in white face) and later shots of children battling with flour-filled sacks, has roots in surrealism, particularly the movement’s exploration of objects in which “objects are at once immediate, intensely real, and infinitely remote, disembodied, disconnected.”49 For Sánchez, the battle scenes suggest something more than actual material reality; they create a fiction. The film then can be understood as a documentary, and yet something else entirely. Levitt and Agee’s second collaboration, The Quiet One (1948), further troubles the borders between documentary and fiction. The film was the joint effort of a number of New York artists: Sidney Meyers, a musician, is credited with directing, while Janice Loeb (a painter), Robert Balgley, and Levitt shot the film (with Loeb and Levitt in charge of the exteriors).50 Levitt and Agee wrote the screenplay, with the latter credited for the voice-over narration and dialogue. The narrative focuses on Donald Peters, an emotionally disturbed young boy whose impoverished life in Harlem leads him into trouble and eventual rehabilitation at the Wiltwyck School for Boys, a residential school for delinquent youth in upstate New York.51 Donald’s story is presented in documentary form, complete with a voice-over that provides details about his background, his psychic state, and the state’s efforts at rehabilitation. Like the photo essays from Fortune and Look, the film’s narration is sociological and psychological; suggesting that Donald’s ghetto background—poverty, absent parents, and “a general lack of love”—has resulted in a pattern of delinquent behavior (he’s caught breaking windows after his mother ignores him in favor of her new husband and child) and an inability to communicate. It’s as if one of Carter’s “Five Social Problems” from the prior decade fulfilled the writer’s doomsday destiny. Moreover, it suggests that Levitt had shifted from her “evasion” of “doctrinaire readings of poverty and delinquency” so praised by Wright earlier in the photographer’s career into a more deterministic view on the role of urban spaces on social behavior (though we cannot underestimate Agee’s role here). The film is an interesting amalgam of nonfiction and fiction modes that share more commonalities with Italian Neorealism than the more didactic postwar American documentaries. For example, it combines nonprofessional (Donald Peters is played by Donald Thompson, an actual resident of Wiltwyck) and professional actors (Garry Merrill, the narrator, and Estelle Evens, Donald’s mother, were working actors); it was shot on location in Harlem and at Wiltwyck; and it focuses on social and economic circumstances that, while not

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caused by war, are devastating nonetheless. Additionally, the story, with narration voiced by the school psychiatrist, is closer to a docudrama than it is to more conventional expository documentary (though no less didactic in its aims). Donald’s story is a collage of actual dossiers of the school’s young residents, yet many circumstances are presented as though the fictional child on screen experiences them at the moment of filming.52 While a number of these events are presumably drawn from the observations of the school’s staff, Donald’s experiences, related in flashback, question the relationship between the image and the voice because they are presented as his experiences yet narrated by another, much as Carter’s text spoke for the five boys in the Look spread. The Quiet One is broken into different sections, including those at the school, where the story begins and ends, an extended flashback outlining Donald’s experiences in Harlem, and a few other flashbacks to the neighborhood during the latter part of the school sequences. We are led into the extended flashback section through a classroom scene in which Donald is looking at words on a chalkboard while the doctor explains, in voice-over, that the child cannot read. Even so, some words, such as “baby,” have traumatic resonances for Donald. The voice-over is accompanied first by a close-up of Donald’s face, a cut to a blurred shot of the word on the chalkboard, and then a cut back to Donald’s face, the entire sequence suggestive of the boy’s point of view. The narrative launches into the flashback with a cut to a still photo of Donald’s family (father, mother, grandmother, Donald as a younger child), while the voice-over functions as a sound bridge to an establishing shot of a Harlem street. The shots and narration set the stage for the urban section of The Quiet One—which was filmed in Harlem but is never identified as such (and resembles Levitt’s other Harlem work). Here we are introduced to the horrors of Donald’s life, narrated by the psychiatrist, with the occasional voices of other people, such as Donald’s grandmother or mother, offering insight into the young boy’s domestic experiences. His grandmother’s voice, for example, takes over the soundtrack once she’s returned home after her unsuccessful search for her missing grandchild (who has spent the night sleeping on the streets in order to avoid a loveless home). During her search, the grandmother’s thoughts are communicated by the male voice-over in the third person (“She’s wishing to goodness sakes she’d never in her life have to smack him, or scold him, or go claim him back from children’s court. Or ever look at his mean, mopey, sassy little face again.”). When a well-meaning neighbor returns Donald, his grandmother’s voice-over (which may or may not be diegetic; it’s unclear) scolds Donald, calling him names and generally abusing him as a prelude to administering a beating. Later, there is a similar use of sound when Donald visits his mother and her new family. In these moments, the sound blurs between diegetic and nondiegetic, and it is unclear whether Donald actually hears the voices or if

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they are more for the audience’s benefit. This lack of sonic distinction is further complicated by the fact that the scene is a flashback narrated by the psychiatrist. Thus, in every iteration, Donald remains the “quiet one” of the title, the silent subject of this dissertation on urban venality and despair. In “Harlem Is Nowhere” Ralph Ellison described a neighborhood psychiatric clinic as a place where Harlem’s residents, black and white, could seek help from urban confusion. For Ellison, one of the major causes of psychiatric distress was the city itself: “To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter under foot with garbage and decay. Harlem is a ruin—many of its ordinary aspects (its crimes, its casual violence, its crumbling buildings with littered area-ways, ill-smelling halls and vermin-invaded rooms) are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams, and which, like muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the waking mind with hidden and threatening significance.”53 The Quiet One uses similar rhetoric, written by Agee and reflective of the general mainstreaming of psychoanalytic discourses during the 1940s, to suggest that the conditions of ghetto living had dire consequences on the mental and physical health of its citizens. In the film we see the effects of such an environment: Donald is antisocial and subliterate, and his actions result in his incarceration in the Wiltwyck School—which is a state-supported institution, albeit one that is presented as more benevolent than a prison. For Ellison, such conditions were contributing factors to the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943. This, along with Carter’s text in Fortune and Look and the narration of The Quiet One, suggests a general urban crisis in U.S. cities (or at least a greater willingness to acknowledge a problem). When the city sections are compared to those shot at the school, the film’s didacticism is more obvious. The film’s opening shots, for example, are set on Wiltwyck’s grounds and include a number of boys (with the exception of Donald) of mixed races playing among trees, grass, and streams. In the city, Donald is often entrapped in spaces, whether they are the small rooms of this grandmother’s and mother’s apartments, or on the streets, where he is often shot in doorways, empty lots, or surrounded by buildings and/or train tracks. At the school, and despite his initial estrangement from the other children, Donald occupies much more space in the frame, and his movements are less constricted by his surroundings. Thus, the film uses a combination of fiction (docudrama; actors rather than actual subjects) and nonfiction (real locations and a narrative based on clinical case studies) to present a relatively conventional narrative of dystopian city life and rural renewal. Like “Harlem Is Nowhere,” The Quiet One suggests that the effects of slum living are not limited to any one race, an attitude reflected in the school’s mixed student body. Yet, it cannot be denied that race plays an implicit role in the

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Figure 17. Donald (Donald Thompson) on the streets of Harlem in The Quiet One (Film Documents, 1948).

film. Returning to the Fortune and the Look features on Harlem from a few years earlier and linking them to other images from the 1940s, one can see the popularization of the notion of black male youth as a, if not the, social problem facing politicians and reformers at this time. Donald may just happen to be black in The Quiet One, and his New York home may not be identified as Harlem, but there is no doubt that it would have been read as such, particularly following the riot of 1943 and the myriad images circulated in its aftermath that supported sociological, anthropological, and psychological discourses seeking to explain urban behavior. But a more dangerous iteration of the troubled male youth, the gang member, also began to emerge at this time. For this we can turn to Gordon Parks’s contribution to the photo-essay genre, “Harlem Gang Leader,” which appeared in Life in November 1948, the same year as The Quiet One.54

Carter’s Social Problems Grow Up: Gordon Parks’s “Harlem Gang Leader” Gordon Parks had a long career as a composer, photographer, writer, and filmmaker, but in 1948 he was still relatively unknown (he had only been taking

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pictures for roughly a decade, having purchased his first camera in 1937). “Harlem Gang Leader” was Parks’s first project for Life, and it represents the culmination of a desire to work in documentary photography that began with his first interaction with FSA photography almost a decade before.55 In his autobiography, Voices in the Mirror, Parks suggests that the Harlem project was more of an afterthought than a well-planned project: in his initial interview with Wilson Hicks, Life’s picture editor, Parks made up a story about Harlem gangs in an attempt to pique the editor’s interest.56 He only found his subject, the gang leader Red Jackson, after Hicks had given him the job. In focusing on Red Jackson, leader of “The Midtowners,” Parks hoped to “help black kids realize the folly in murdering one another.”57 To accomplish the shoot, Parks spent roughly four weeks following Red and the gang around the streets of Harlem, accompanying them during various activities—including a visit to a funeral parlor and attending fights with rival gangs—and gradually gaining their trust. Additionally, Parks met and interviewed Red’s mother and community members who were trying to save the young delinquent from a life of crime, including a police detective (responsible for the initial introduction between Parks and Red) and a local clergyman. The resulting feature is very much in adherence with photo-essay conventions, particularly those discussed from the decade before. Much like the “Five Social Problems” from Look, “Harlem Gang Member” documents social and economic conditions of the neighborhood; conditions that appear to be unchanged despite an intervening decade that witnessed a riot, a World War, and an increase in civil rights discourses and actions. The article opens, for example, with a block of text positioned over a photo of the Harlem skyline: The tower in the upper right-hand corner of this page belongs to New York City’s famous Riverside Church. Stretching off to the left of it are the classic buildings of Columbia University and the elegant apartments of some of the city’s leading citizens. Nestled just below these, under the smoke and haze, are the crowded tenements and the cluttered, dreary streets of Harlem, the U.S.’s biggest Negro community. Here 500,000 people live, crammed into a ghettolike section built originally to hold less than half that number. Schools, like housing, are crowded and run-down, and at the close of each day overworked teachers are glad to turn their restless pupils back into the streets. With little to do but roam around, the children often band together into street gangs. . . .58

The unattributed text—only Parks receives credit for the photos—introduces the space before the subject, and sets the tone for the following story of black urban criminality. Strikingly, the text marks Harlem and its gang members as

FIGURE 18. Red Jackson, Harlem, New York, 1948. Photograph by Gordon Parks. ©The Gordon Parks Foundation.

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exceptional, for though their “acts of violence are not worse than those of white gangs in Brooklyn and other parts of the city . . . [they] have more to be frustrated about, and to fear.”59 The remainder of the article describes Red’s “unhappy life” over “four hectic weeks.”60 The text, functioning in an expository manner much like a cinematic voice-over, introduces readers to the social hierarchy of The Midtowners, along with its disputes and alliances with other local gangs. The commentary also builds on the possible environmental factors for Red’s behavior, first introduced in the opening paragraph: a police force that often looks the other way, Harlem’s high unemployment, and a lack of support systems for youth, especially from family. And here the text points out that Red has not seen his father in “at least four years,” supporting the already-common popular belief in the dysfunctional black family (almost two decades before Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”). Red’s mother is curiously irrelevant in the text, even though she appears in one photograph, sharing a moment with Red and another (unnamed) son. The photo is set in the domestic sphere and suggests a loving and supporting presence that is then effectively negated by her visual and textual absence in the remainder of the spread. Whatever modicum of domesticity suggested by the photo of Red’s mother is undermined by the disparity in the way that he is treated in pictures. The gang leader is on display in almost every photograph, and the majority of images present him as an example of violent black masculinity. This is especially the case in the feature’s full-page images: in one, for example, Red and another gang member stand over the casket of a friend who has been beaten to death by a rival gang. The photo’s composition is such that the two young men stand behind the casket while the body and face of the deceased boy is fully exposed to the magazine’s readers. In another full-page photo, we see Red fighting with rival gang members. Such images must then be compared to moments when Red does not appear to be a threat—when he’s with his mother, with Father Bishop, or when he’s receiving an award for “boy Mayor of Harlem.” These images consume much less space on the page and two appear outside of the initial spread, surrounding a larger block of text and bordered by advertising. The larger photos display Harlem’s living conditions through the spectacle of Red and other violent black male teens. And yet, this is tempered somewhat by the text’s inclusion of Red’s voice (provided in quotations rather than, like in The Quiet One, via paraphrase). While much of Red’s narrations focus on gang life, others—mostly located outside the main spread—detail his attempts to avoid certain fates. For example, in a later section, Red tells of learning firsthand about the negatives of prison life and voices his shame at having spent time in jail.61 In another section he discusses his desire to get a job, a girlfriend, and

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leave gang life because it offers no future.62 Such moments provide a sympathetic discourse on black youth from the subject’s perspective, but they are overshadowed by images that suggest a very different version of black manhood. Editorial concern for Red (voiced through the text) is exchanged for the production of “marketable shock,”63 one created by Parks, who contributed images documenting violence and death. Such images of Harlem’s youth continued to appear in print and moving image, and Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World serves as the perfect text with which to conclude this discussion of the visual evolution of the young black male as the prime signifier of Harlem’s contemporary problems.

Taking It to the Streets: Experimental Fiction Film in Harlem Like photographers, who took to the streets in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, postwar filmmakers, liberated by the development of lightweight cameras and sound equipment, increasingly shot on location, capturing the sights and sounds of the cityscape, and changing cinematic aesthetics in the process.64 First appearing in Europe, in Italian Neorealism’s narratives of war-torn strife, the selfconscious style of the French nouvelle vague, and the working-class focus of the British New Wave, it was not long before the practice of shooting everyday subject matter on location with direct sound arrived in the United States, buoyed by a new generation of American filmmakers emerging out of film schools and with more opportunities in the wake of the breakup of the studios’ monopoly on American film. In the United States the new technologies and approaches to narrative went in two directions. On one hand, lighter and cheaper equipment encouraged young artist-filmmakers to experiment with cinematic form outside of the boundaries of Hollywood and/or narrative convention. Many of these filmmakers, such as Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, and Shirley Clarke, had attended some of the first film schools in New York and Los Angeles and were making films that eschewed Hollywood conventions, producing avant-garde shorts and features that experimented with the medium’s formal elements. On the other hand were directors such as George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma, also graduates of film production or studies programs, who briefly worked on the outskirts of the industry (and then increasingly from within) making films that self-consciously redefined the codes and conventions of Hollywood narrative cinema. New fiction aesthetics were complemented by changes in documentary filmmaking, which also began exploring the medium’s relationship to the presentation of reality. In France, for example, ethnographer Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin released Chronique d’un ête/Chronicle of a Summer in 1961.

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The film, a study of a group of Parisians over the course of a summer, broke the documentary mold in a number of ways. First, the filmmakers’ use of lighter equipment and faster film stock gave them access to the intimate spaces of their subjects’ lives. Second, the film was highly self-conscious about its status as a document of “real” life; for example, the directors appear in the film, and the subjects occasionally handle the equipment and record moments in their own lives. Third, the subjects’ roles in the film extended to a final screening, in which the filmmakers solicited participants’ opinions about the final product. Such an approach to documentary filmmaking, which previously used the aesthetics of authority and disengagement (voice-over narration with visuals as supplemental evidence), granted subjects access to equipment and meaning making and provided audiences with a more reflexive understanding of the role of film in constructing documentary truth. Coined cinéma vérité (after Dziga Vertov’s concept of kinopravda) by Morin, Rouch’s approach to ethnographic filmmaking had longstanding influence on nonfiction and fiction filmmaking in Europe and abroad (for example, Rouch was embraced by filmmakers associated with the nouvelle vague, and there are stylistic and thematic similarities between the two film movements). Similar changes were happening in the United States through the efforts of a group of journalists and filmmakers brought together by former Life photographer Robert Drew, including Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Al Maysles, among others. Drew, building on his experience as an editor of the photographic essay, developed an aesthetic that was similar to cinéma vérité in that it used lightweight 16mm cameras and sync-sound to record footage of subjects and events as they occurred. Unlike the French, however, who tended to be more obviously reflexive in their filmmaking, Drew and his associates distanced themselves from the action, letting meaning emerge through observation rather than direct intervention. For example, Drew’s first film, Primary (1960), followed its subject, Senator John F. Kennedy, during his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. The crew’s mobile equipment, which allowed them to follow Kennedy’s every movement (in an out of cars and crowds, on stage and in hotel rooms) provided a more detailed and personal take on a presidential candidate than had previously been seen by audiences. Moreover, the film, like many of Drew’s productions at this time, was broadcast on television and introduced American viewers to a new type of television journalism and documentary film, one that combined the immediacy of news reportage with the more intimate aesthetics of vérité filmmaking. Shirley Clarke, whose The Cool World (1963) is one of the first, if not the first, postwar fiction films shot wholly on location in Harlem, emerged out of this environment. Clarke’s film is an important example of how changing cinematic aesthetics were a natural fit for urban subject matter, whether the

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location was Rome, Paris, or New York. Clarke’s use of moving camera, sync-sound, and nonprofessional actors link back to Italian Neorealism, and yet The Cool World also is a compelling and convincing example of the continuing prevalence of many of the themes taken up by earlier African American filmmakers: urban crime and poverty, African American representation and self-representation, and the failure of institutions such as the family, religion, and education. In this way then, The Cool World can be seen as following in the steps of race films from decades before, while also picking up the aesthetics and liberal discourses of the photo-text.65 The Cool World was adapted by Clarke and Carl Lee, who also appears in the film, from the best-selling novel (published in 1959) by Warren Miller, a white novelist known both for his political novels and for his more esoteric stories, such as The Way We Live Now, a novel about white suburban life.66 Like Miller’s novel, the film focuses on Duke Custis, a black teenager and member of the “Royal Pythons” (the “Royal Crocadiles” [sic] in the novel), a Harlem street gang. Duke’s home life is a mess: his Bible-quoting grandmother only understands the world through religion; a string of demanding “husbands” and outside work distract his mother; and his father, like Donald’s and Red’s, is absent. Duke’s main goal is to buy a gun from a local gangster named Priest (Lee) in order to take the leadership of the gang from Blood, its current heroin-addicted “president.” Duke succeeds in ousting Blood, but he never manages to raise enough cash to buy the desired Colt pistol (though Priest briefly lends it to the young man).67 The film ends with Duke’s brutal arrest after he has killed a member of a rival gang, a change from the novel, which adds an “epilogue” featuring a redeemed Duke in reform school, a setting similar to that in The Quiet One. The Cool World thus tells a by-now familiar story of a Harlem teen who succumbs to a life of crime for lack of options. The novel’s sympathetic focus on a young black man living in an urban dystopia can be placed within the tradition of realist city literature such as Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), which details the trials and tribulations of an African American family in Harlem, and more broadly in the serié noire detective stories of Chester Himes, with their documentary-like descriptions of Harlem in the 1950s.68 But it also appeared at a moment when more proactive civil rights discourses were becoming common in mainstream media. At the same time as magazines like Life, for example, were featuring images of civil rights workers and protesters in the South, Miller’s The Cool World presented a version of northern racism and discrimination through its realist rendering of the contemporary conditions in Harlem. Miller, according to Christopher Sieving, was interested in “producing a document that would move people to ‘do something’ about conditions in the ghetto.”69 That it was successful is suggested by James Baldwin’s observation that it was “one of the finest novels about Harlem that had ever come [his] way.”70

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The film is a convergence of texts and aesthetics from the time. Miller’s novel, for instance, is noteworthy for its first-person narrator, Duke, and for the author’s use of street vernacular to voice Duke’s thoughts and aspirations, a technique not used by a white novelist since, perhaps, Carl Van Vechten incorporated black dialect into his controversial Nigger Heaven in 1926. Duke is an unreliable, often unsympathetic character, and yet his behavior is not seen as some sort of inherent weakness. Instead, his criminality is presented as a result of his environment, a Harlem described by Duke’s grandmother as a “hore [sic] of Babylon” that offers its residents only poverty, criminality, and addiction, and no idea of the world that exists beyond its borders. This myopia is most poignantly voiced by Luanne, the gang’s prostitute, who is unaware that New York City abuts an ocean. In this context Duke’s desire to procure a gun is more than a desire to be cool, it is a tool for self-definition and survival. For Duke, “When you have a gun then you aint no animal anymore. You a hunter and can stand tall and don’t have to take a soundin from nobody.”71 By the time she began working on the adaptation of The Cool World, Clarke had built up a formidable filmography. A trained dancer, she began her filmmaking career shooting dance films, such as Dance in the Sun (1953) and A Moment in Love (1957). After taking film classes at City College under the tutelage of Hans Richter and attending various downtown programs of experimental works, including Maya Deren’s screenings of her own films and those organized by Amos Vogel as part of Cinema 16, Clarke began experimenting with form and rhythm outside of filmed choreography. Skyscraper (1959), a film she codirected with Willard Van Dyke, is a good example of her developing style: Clarke met Van Dyke, the well-known documentarian, when he hired her, along with Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and others, to make a number of short films for the United States pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.72 After Clarke’s work was rejected by the State Department as being “too ambiguous,”73 she collaborated with Van Dyke to make Skyscraper, an experimental documentary about the construction of a high-rise building in Manhattan (essentially continuing the city symphony tradition from decades before). In addition to her documentary work, Clarke was also an original member of the New American Cinema Group. The group, spearheaded by Jonas Mekas (whom Clarke met at City College), was a loosely organized collective of independent filmmakers, distributors, and producers that included Gregory Markopoulos, Emile de Antonio, Robert Frank, and Lionel Rogosin, among others. The aesthetic position of the group, as identified in its “First Statement” (which appeared in Film Culture in 1961), was that “the official cinema all over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring.” Members of the group, like those young filmmakers associated with the nouvelle vague, wanted to liberate themselves from what they identified as the “Product” (in other words,

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mainstream or studio) film, and to build a cinema based on “personal expression” with new forms of financing, exhibition, and distribution.74 As this suggests, Clarke was equally involved in this scene as she was in the nonfiction world and many of her subsequent feature films, such as The Connection (1962), The Cool World, and Portrait of Jason (1967), exhibit the combined influence of nonfiction and avant-garde filmmaking techniques. The Cool World, like many of Clarke’s films, is the result of collaborations with other filmmakers and artists, namely, Carl Lee and Frederick Wiseman, the latter whom she met at Filmmakers, Inc.75 Wiseman, a lawyer by training, had not yet begun directing his own films (his directorial debut was Titucut Follies, released in 1967), but he was associating with filmmakers, learning the craft, and investing in projects, including The Connection, Clarke’s infamous (it was originally censored for language and drug references) adaptation of Jack Gelber’s play about drug addicts (also titled The Connection).76 Wiseman read Miller’s The Cool World in the late 1950s and was interested in adapting the story to film. He bought the novel’s rights for $10,000 in 1961 and asked Clarke to direct the film based on her work on The Connection.77 Lee joined the production through his previous involvement with both the stage and the film versions of The Connection. Lee, the son of stage and screen performer Canada Lee, was a stage actor who won an Obie for his performance as “Cowboy” in The Connection. Clarke and Lee, who became romantically involved sometime during the production of The Connection, collaborated on the screen adaptation of The Cool World. In addition to his cowriting credit, Lee is listed as the film’s casting and dialogue director. In the former role, Lee helped audition nonprofessional actors for most of the roles in the film, including Duke (played by Hampton Clanton in his only screen role), Luanne (Yolanda Rodriguez), Littleman (Gary Bolling), and Rod (Bostic Felton), often “scouring settlement houses, social clubs, and schools, not for the ‘star’ pupils . . . but for the noncooperative boys, loners, most of whom led lives similar to those of the gang members they depicted.”78 The only professional actors in the film were Lee, Clarence Brooks (in his first credited screen role), and Gloria Foster (who appeared in Nothing but a Man the following year). In his latter role as dialogue director, Lee aided the actors with dialogue techniques, since much of the street slang was transferred from novel to screenplay. Indeed, Clarke “trusted Lee, a Harlem native, to vouch for the authenticity of the events and situations in the script.”79 While Lee’s contribution was initially expunged from the film’s original advertisements, there is no doubt that he played a significant role in the film’s rendering of the sights and sounds of contemporary Harlem. In addition to the film’s links to the photo-text, the documentary, and the art film, The Cool World retains some conventions from race films of the 1930s and ’40s, especially those related to the gangster genre, and in this way it can be seen as part of a continuum of black city film focusing on contemporary urban

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conditions. Like the protagonists of the earlier films, Duke is determined to rise through the ranks of the gang, even turning on Blood, its president, as a means to get to the top. Additionally, and like Curly in Dark Manhattan from 1937, Duke does not so much choose a life of crime as have one chosen for him through a lack of mobility and options. His behavior is a result of his environment rather than any deep-seated criminality, and both the novel and the film suggest that his impoverished home life is partially to blame for his outcome. Finally, Duke, like many of his gangster forebears, is punished for his crimes: the film ends with the young man being led away in a cruiser after being beaten by the NYPD.80 But whereas the novel adds a two-page conclusion with him in reform school happily tending flower beds (much like The Quiet One), the film’s conclusion is less clear-cut, and Duke’s fate at the hands of the police remains unclear, eerily echoing the unknown fate of the young man in the riot photos from 1943. Yet The Cool World is neither a gangster film nor a race film, and it breaks with these earlier forms in ways that ultimately return us to the photo-text’s reformist legacies. First, even though he drinks, smokes, and fornicates, Duke is only fourteen years old, and both his family and the state have labeled him as irredeemable. Neither his mother nor his grandmother has any control over him, and both, like the maternal figures in The Quiet One, predict his eventual demise, his mother even suggesting that he’s following in the footsteps of the majority of Harlem’s men. As this implies, Duke and the other gang members are viewed as criminals by both the black and the white communities. The gang’s crimes do not benefit the neighborhood and are, more often than not, focused on personal gain.81 Finally, and perhaps most important, gangs, which used to be highly organized business operations, now rest in the hands of adolescents more concerned with day-to-day subsistence than the fiduciary health of the organization. Duke and his fellow gang members exhibit a nihilism, an apathy voiced by the young man near the novel’s conclusion: “Every day the same and I don’t see nothing ahead but the same for me.”82 The important point here is that the film and novel, drawing from preexisting sociological, political, and aesthetic discourses, has replaced the gangster with the gang member. The Cool World’s aesthetics combine documentary realism with the rhythmic editing patterns of the city symphony to present a less conventional (at least aurally) Harlem of the early 1960s. To a certain extent, this combination is no surprise, given that Clarke had been developing such aesthetics throughout her career. But these formal choices become more compelling if we understand them in the context of African American cinema aesthetics that, in an attempt to break free of stereotype, favored nonfiction film over Hollywood illusionism or experimental film. Clarke’s film, which combines nonfiction and fiction would seem to be taking the representation of African American subject matter in a new direction, and in many ways it was both a development of the semidocumentary aesthetics of The Quiet One and a precursor to the aesthetics of

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immediacy (location shooting, direct sound) used by Melvin Van Peebles in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (1971) just a few years later (and conventionalized by blaxploitation filmmakers in the early 1970s).83 The film’s style has roots in Italian Neorealism, which also sought to present the lives of everyday people living in crumbling surroundings. But whereas the Italians used settings destroyed by international war and occupation, The Cool World’s rubble-strewn streets are the result of an overwhelming governmental disregard for (and perhaps domestic war on) the area; one that had been present visibly since the 1930s in Aaron Siskind’s and Helen Levitt’s work. Duke and his friends hang out in abandoned buildings, play in empty lots (filled with rubble), and walk down garbage-filled streets. The interiors (shot on location in an abandoned tenement building loaned to the shoot by the NYC Housing Authority) are just as bad; the tenements are dark and foreboding, and Duke is attacked at the beginning of the film in the hallway of his own building. The apartments themselves are cramped and crowded with too many bodies.84 Privacy is nonexistent and occupants overhear each other’s conversations, arguments, and acts of sex. Such claustrophobia and squalor permeates the mise-en-scène, with the few moments when Duke leaves the neighborhood as significant exceptions. The first time he travels outside Harlem, for example, occurs near the beginning of the film when he and his classmates are taken on an end-of-the-year fieldtrip downtown to the Stock Exchange. The sequence includes the bus ride downtown, and a brief episode with the boys on Wall Street. Clarke shot the action inside the bus, and mixed the sound of the excited boys with their teacher’s voice as he introduces various passing sights, such as the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. The shots from inside the bus continue the uptown claustrophobia; the space is tight, and the boys are framed by the lines of windows on each side of the vehicle’s interior. The composition communicates the boys’ imprisonment (they are, after all, social problems). The interior shots are intercut with images of the outside world passing by the windows. These shots are more loosely framed, and places like Fifth Avenue are bright, clean, filled with white people, and off limits to the boys, who barely notice the passing surroundings. The overall sense is one of containment and displacement, which is ironically underscored when Mr. Shapiro shows them into the Stock Exchange building and hands them pamphlets titled, “Own a Share of America.” In the story’s scenario, the closest Duke will ever get to achieving this goal is if he manages to buy the Colt pistol. Duke’s second trip outside of Harlem involves taking Luanne to Coney Island in Brooklyn. The sequence starts with an establishing shot of the Atlantic in the distance, framed by Duke and Luanne in the foreground. As the couple approaches the water, they are loosely framed, and their movements are

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FIGURE 19. Duke (Hampton Clanton) and his prized Colt pistol in The Cool World (Wiseman Film Productions, 1963).

intercut with shots of sunbathers, in various stages of lounging, swimming, or exercising. This composition continues while the couple remains on the beach, looking out at the ocean and discussing what exists beyond the horizon. Once they return to the boardwalk and Duke plays a variety of arcade games, the shots become slightly tighter and more formally composed and the soundtrack shifts into a polyphony of noises, including the couple’s voices, music, games, and other carnival sounds. This is the only scene in the film in which Duke and Luanne behave like the young people they are, rather than the gang member and prostitute roles they play while in Harlem, and the open framing symbolizes their youth and momentary happiness. This changes however, during the game-playing sequence. Duke becomes engrossed in the shooting and throwing games and Luanne disappears (though her laughter is heard on the soundtrack), never to reappear in either Coney Island or Harlem, again. Duke’s solitude is then suggested by a shot of him on a now-desolate beach, calling out for Luanne. By the time he returns to a rain-soaked Harlem, he is again surrounded by garbage and filth. Shooting on location provided Clarke and her crew with the opportunity to film Harlem street scenes and residents, and the director incorporated such footage into both the more realist moments of the film and the experimental

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street montages that appear throughout. An example of the former opens the film, which begins with an establishing shot of a street-corner speaker (Richard Ward) preaching, in his words, about “the problem with the white man in America.” Rather than framing him in a medium or a long shot, a more conventional approach to establishing space and character, Clarke’s first frames introduce the unnamed speaker in extreme close up, directly addressing the audience. The first words of the film are: “Do you know the truth about the white man? The black man is the original man!” After this startling (though scripted) opening, which succeeds in calling viewers to attention, the camera tracks back, revealing the speaker’s body, and then pans over the faces of the listeners gathered around. At this point the film cuts from the long take to a montage of the listeners, in close-up or medium shot, with the speaker’s words accompanying the images in voice-over. Interspersed through the shots of different black men and women of different ages, are white NYPD officers, mostly in medium or medium long shots. The scene ends on a medium shot of Duke (who has yet to be introduced), who meets his friend Rod and discusses the purchase of a pistol. While the scene is unrelated to the film’s overall narrative, it sets the tone for the remainder of the story. Such self-consciousness, like the extreme closeups and direct address, would have been relatively rare in American fiction filmmaking at this time, though Clarke’s The Connection, a festival success, had already indicated her openness to formal experimentation. What’s more compelling about the scene, however, is what it suggests about the political climate in Harlem. The film was released the same year as the March on Washington, when civil rights discourses of integration had become status quo in the few Hollywood films, such as The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958) and A Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie, 1961), that included the topics of race and racism. Instead, the speaker’s assertion of black exceptionalism and white venality (“the white man devil”) acknowledges the presence of more politicized, though less mainstream, discourses of Black Nationalist movements that were circulating in African American communities at this time. In fact, the monologue is a “condensation of views collected in C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America.”85 Clarke’s acknowledgment of the very-visible police presence, furthermore, reflexively suggests the power of the state’s attempts to limit free speech through a controlling gaze and other forms of intimidation (at one point a police officer even ushers an onlooker from the scene). The shaky camera and rapid editing capture the tensions between the neighborhood the rest of the city, and the neighborhood and the police, tensions that erupted the following year in a riot. The film’s thematic editing extends to numerous nonnarrative sequences illustrating the influence of more experimental aesthetics, particularly the city symphony, on the director’s cinematic sensibility. The sequences’ aural and

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visual montages appear throughout the film, sometimes combining street scenes with Duke’s voice-over (normally musing on the Colt pistol) or with a nondiegetic jazz score by Mal Waldren. While at times the sequences are related to events in the narrative, for example, Duke’s voice-over discussing what it takes to survive in the city is accompanied by images of stray dogs and cats and trash-strewn sidewalks, others suggest Harlem’s vibrancy. These latter moments, according to Albert Johnson, make “The Cool World a work of visual poetry [and] a tone poem of the slums.”86 Early in the film, for example, a brief interlude occurs in which shots of people in the Harlem’s rainy, traffic-clogged streets are set to the sounds of traffic and jazz, conveying a “poetic sense of black street life from the inside of Harlem culture.”87 A longer, later interlude provides a more detailed overview of Harlem life, set, again, to a jazz soundtrack. In this sequence, however, the nondiegetic music enters into the world of the film. Halfway through The Cool World, Duke leaves the gang’s apartment, having fought with Blood the night before (and setting the stage for the latter’s ousting). It is early in the morning, and Duke exits the building into a neighborhood readying for the start of the day. As he leaves, the shot cuts briefly to a man playing a saxophone, a cameo by Dizzy Gillespie (who also appears on the soundtrack), before Duke heads down the street, on his way, once again, to attempt to raise money for the pistol. A montage sequence, thematically organized around the concept of vibrancy, follows and functions as a contrast to the more claustrophobic and dystopian portions of the film. The shots present a variety of early morning activities, from fishmongers gutting fish, to men delivering food, to people sweeping the sidewalks in front of buildings. The pattern shifts midway through, as if self-consciously referencing the use of music, to shots of people dancing, laughing, and playing games like checkers. The editing is rapid, and framing varies from closeups to medium shots depending on the content. Moments such as this contrast with the film’s mostly dark interiors and hopeless lives and provide an alternative to the argument, made by some critics, that the film shows nothing more than the victimization of black people in Harlem. The presence of Gillespie, record players, and other sources of music suggest the neighborhood’s vitality. Duke, unfortunately, is oblivious to the people and culture by which he is surrounded. The film’s exhibition history provides the greatest clue to its difference from the race films of earlier generations and suggests the difficulties of producing a film that at once defies generic descriptions and yet is intended to raise political consciousness. While it was an independent feature focusing on African American characters and subjects, black viewers were not the film’s initial audience. Instead, The Cool World premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1963 before having a limited run in small art houses around the country. The Cool World’s genesis from street novel to art house film was solidified in the

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press it received upon release. Whereas most black critics remained mute on the film, it was reviewed by a wide variety of mainstream newspapers, including the New York Times; prestigious periodicals, such as the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Nation; and film journals such as Film Quarterly, Film Comment, and Films and Filming. Most critics were relatively positive, with a number, including Bosley Crowther in the New York Times and Harriet R. Polt in Film Quarterly remarking on the film’s “authenticity.” Polt, in particular, opined that Clarke “persuades me that Harlem is like that,”88 an observation, like most of the reviews, written by a cultural and geographic outsider. Nonetheless, what such comments suggest is that black representation, especially when incorporating nonfiction aesthetics, was connected positively with verisimilitude, an interpretation encouraged to some extent by the film’s aesthetics and advance press. One of the rare reviews from an African American film critic was Albert Johnson’s, “The Negro in American Films: Some Recent Works,” which appeared in Film Quarterly in 1965 (Polt’s review appeared in the same journal in Winter 1963–1964). Johnson, the program director for the San Francisco International Film Festival and the former U.S. editor for Sight and Sound magazine, was firmly entrenched in the art cinema world, and his review of Clarke’s film is similar to many that had already appeared.89 Johnson, for example, praised Clarke’s films as “honest, extremely personal works.” The author, however, makes certain to specify the differences between black and white audience receptions. For Johnson, the film’s presentation of Harlem was not new for African American audiences familiar with Harlem writing by Anne Petry or Richard Wright. White audiences, less familiar with the neighborhood will see the “beautifully observed vignettes of Negroes living calmly in an unnatural habitat [as] etchings of cinematic truthfulness.” While perhaps a critique of the film’s white liberal politics, Johnson argues that Clarke avoids cliché and, instead, provides audiences with “the most important film document about Negro life in Harlem to have been made so far.”90 The Cool World appeared twenty years after the images of the Harlem riot that opened this discussion, and year before another riot devastated the neighborhood again. There’s no denying that in the intervening years (and even more so if we take the Carter-Siskind collaborations into account), the neighborhood—and the nation as whole—experienced a multiplicity of political, social, and aesthetic changes. In fact, The Cool World, references one such (political) change in an opening sequence when the Muslim delineates the “problem of the white man” for a sidewalk audience in Harlem. And yet, some continuities remain, particularly when we focus on the ways in which African American urban life and experiences were increasingly visually connected to the themes of poverty and criminality. The problem for African Americans at this time may have been the white man, but for the nation as a whole, the problem

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of the inner city—and the color line more broadly—was most often embodied by black male youth engaged in criminal activity. Since the 1930s, Harlem had become less a promised land and more “the epicenter of American dysfunction.”91 Harlem youth could not help but be pulled into its criminal vortex, and American media broadcast their image in still and moving form.

4 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Gangster’s Paradise Drugs and Crime in Harlem, from Blaxploitation to New Jack Cinema

This book is about Harlem. Fabulous, “exotic” Harlem. A city within a city, walled in by the enemy and occupied by enemy forces. . . . [This] is not a story of a people hopelessly lost in a quagmire of despair and helplessness, but the story of the people fighting back against overwhelming odds, which makes it a very special kind of book. —John O. Killens, Harlem Stirs

By the time that The Cool World was shown on screens around the world, the assertion that Harlem was a ghetto was familiar to film audiences; the popular press had been broadcasting portraits (still and moving) of inner-city despair, decay, and victimhood since the 1930s. Such images were the product of a number of political, social, economic, and aesthetic factors, including sociological discourses supporting environmental determinism and governmental abandonment of inner-city areas. Film borrowed from ethnographic and experimental filmmaking in an attempt to match aesthetics with such discourses. The result was a new urban realism that shifted away from Hollywood genres and focused, more than in the past, on the impact of city life on young African American men. Films like The Cool World in particular illustrated what was at stake in the city for their young protagonists; many were destined to meet violent ends, whether it be at the hands of another gang member or, just as likely, the result of a run-in with the police. Just such a violent exchange occurred the year following the release of The Cool World and resulted in another riot in Harlem. Like earlier moments of violence in the neighborhood (1935 and 1943, in particular) the 1964 event involved police brutality; a black teenager named James Powell was shot to death by an off-duty NYPD officer. Powell, a fifteen-year-old high school student—basically the same age as Duke in The Cool World—was shot twice by Lt. Thomas Gilligan when the latter overreacted to the teen’s roughhousing with other young men. 126

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News of the shooting spread quickly throughout Harlem, and violence began after police marched on demonstrators who had been organized into a peaceful protest by members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The uprising lasted six days and resulted in one death, scores of injuries and arrests, and a vast amount of property damage.1 Like the 1943 disturbance, journalists reported the story of the 1964 riot both nationally and internationally.2 Unlike the earlier occurrence, however, the 1964 riot was also broadcast nightly on national television news programs, thus adding an element of the “here and now” to the events that had been missing from earlier still or newsreel images, which by virtue of the medium presented more of a “there and then” perspective on their subject.3 Such social unrest was directly acknowledged in Harlem Stirs, a photo-text published in 1966 that covered a number of Harlem protests and civil rights actions from 1963 through 1965, focusing on a rent strike in 1963–1964 and a school boycott that occurred the same year as the riot. Like photo-texts from the 1930s and ’40s, Harlem Stirs was a collaboration of individuals with sympathetic political views: the majority of photographs were supplied by Anthony Aviles and Don Charles, the latter who was most widely associated with his portraits of the Nation of Islam. The images are a collage of various street scenes and portraits of people connected to political and social change. They tell a story of New York’s racial and economic disparities, Harlem’s conditions, and the efforts of area residents to change the situation through peaceful protest and other actions. The written text was drawn from a selection of state and local documents, combined with prose by Frank Halstead, a “point man in the pro-Castro Socialist Workers party” and James Baldwin, who participated in the protests.4 John Oliver Killens—an activist and novelist, founder of the Harlem Writers Guild in the early 1950s, and a central figure in the Black Arts movement—wrote the prologue.5 Lastly, the publisher, Carl Marzani, was a Communist Party organizer and activist who had served time in prison for his political activities. Overall, the images and text detail substandard living conditions and the community’s attempts to remedy the problems through cooperation and peaceful protest. They tell a tale of victims trying to change their situation. While Harlem Stirs continues with the genre’s tendency to expose the neighborhood’s poverty and despair—despite its stated intention to do otherwise—its focus on community organization adopted a more proactive tone than what appeared in previous photo-texts, a fact apparent in the prologue, which ends with a promise: This book pictures Harlem as the protagonist, up to its ears in trials and tribulations and blood and tears, but a people rising up and fighting back, a people who have refused to lie down and let the rats take over. I hope this book gets the wide audience it certainly deserves. America

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needs to face these people in this book honestly and hear their stories. For the black folk in the Northern ghettos, like their brothers and sisters below the Line, are determined to change the world they live in. And we are in for years and years of long hot summers, summers that will make Watts and Harlem very pallid by comparison. Everything points to the grim reality that: You ain’t seen nothing yet!6

The book’s mixture of text and photographs leads readers on a journey through the city’s political, economic, and social disparities—of housing, education, health—as a means of building up to its coverage of community activism and organization. The climax of Harlem Stirs occurs in its coverage of a series of rent strikes in 1963 and 1964, which mobilized community residents, political leaders, and cultural figures like Baldwin. The combination of text and image links Harlem’s struggles to the civil rights actions taking place in the South, particularly focusing on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) voter registration activities and suggesting that the two spaces are linked politically and culturally. Finally, Harlem Stirs ends with a brief acknowledgment of the 1964 riot and the words of Malcolm X, rhetorically organizing text and image so that the overall effect is not only of a neighborhood stirring, but one that has risen. Unlike earlier texts, which tended to show either victimhood or a community detached from political action, Harlem Stirs is an example of a more direct political message; one in which circumstances were dire and, if not changed, could lead to more violence.7 Killens’s prophecy—“You ain’t seen nothing yet!”—was echoed four years later in the form of a coda attached to the end of Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). As Sweetback escapes across the Southern California desert into Mexico—a fugitive for having beaten two LAPD officers— the film promises that “a Baadasssss nigger will be returning to collect some dues.” Sweetback documents a post–Watts Rebellion, post–civil rights context in which discourses of direct action and cultural nationalism via groups like the Black Panthers, CORE, and the Black Arts movement had begun to replace the more assimilationist rhetoric of the civil rights movement from the previous decades (hints of which we’ve seen already in The Cool World’s opening speaker and in the Harlem Stirs collaboration). The film made a (super)hero of Sweetback, a sex-worker-turned-revolutionary who answered police brutality in kind, action that was applauded by many in the black community. Contributing to Sweetback’s timely political message was Van Peebles’s knowledge of international and Hollywood film conventions. From the former, for example, Van Peebles, who made his first feature-length film, La permission/ The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968) in France, incorporated many of the innovations of the nouvelle vague, including jump cuts and montage editing, elliptical narratives, direct sound, and location shooting. From the latter, the

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director, who had worked in Hollywood prior to making Sweetback (and used some of his earnings to finance the film), borrowed generic conventions of the road movie and the crime film, which, with the success of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), were experiencing a popular resurgence, especially among youth audiences. Sweetback was immensely successful—and controversial—both within and outside of the African American community, and its massive earnings forced Hollywood to take note of the African American box office.8 Ironically, Van Peebles used many of the same aesthetics as Shirley Clarke in The Cool World, but his combination of story elements that eschewed victimhood and a savvy marketing campaign directed at black urban audiences resulted in a different exhibition history and critical reception. Indeed, it indicated the changes in aesthetics and politics in the decade between these films. Numerous scholars have credited Sweetback with sparking the blaxploitation boom of the 1970s. While there’s no doubt that the film encouraged industry investment in the black action genre, the circumstances were already in place for this interest at this time. First, as the reference to Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider suggests, the industry was retooling itself for a newer, younger generation of filmmakers to appeal to a shifting audience demographic. By the late 1960s, the industry was in financial crisis, with formerly lucrative formulas (such as the musical) failing to attract a younger, educated audience. Companies were willing to take risks with a new generation of directors—often university trained and film literate—who came cheap and were making revisions of already successful formulas. These factors, coupled with the replacement of the Production Code with an industrywide ratings system in 1968, opened the industry to new material. The ratings system allowed for previously proscribed content to appear in films, and by the 1970s, American films included scenes of often-stylized violence, explicit sexuality, and unpunished criminality. Additionally, previously taboo subjects, such as miscegenation, began to appear in theaters, and Van Peebles, along with other filmmakers (blaxploitation or otherwise), capitalized on the subject through the inclusion of explicit interracial sex scenes. How was Harlem treated in blaxploitation films? Elsewhere, I have argued that Ossie Davis’s Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) provides one of the first “big budget” cinematic examples of Harlem: shot on a budget of a little over $1 million, it was distributed by United Artists and featured experienced African American performers such as Godfrey Cambridge, Redd Foxx, Calvin Lockhart, and Judy Pace. Moreover, it was a direct precursor to the blaxploitation film, having been released nine months prior to Sweetback.9 Like Sweetback, Cotton Comes to Harlem is set in an urban landscape specifically identified with African American politics and culture (and recent political strife). Unlike Sweetback, however, the film was much more indebted to the conventions of

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crime fiction: an adaptation of Chester Himes’s novel of the same name, the film focuses on a pair of African American police detectives, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, who are assigned to Harlem. While the film’s focus on two police officers, along with its relatively conventional narrative, suggests a debt to Hollywood, Cotton Comes to Harlem, like its source text, adapts generic conventions for a specific context; for example, Jones and Johnson are outspoken critics of the NYPD, and their liminality in both communities—the police and the neighborhood—is a source of tension throughout the narrative. Furthermore, while Davis celebrated the neighborhood’s diversity and community, the film’s story and mise-en-scène also acknowledged—like its source text—many of the neighborhood’s problems, including crime, poverty, and drug use. In short, Cotton Comes to Harlem functioned as a model for future Harlem crime films, and its mixture of celebration and critique can be seen in a number of films from the time, particularly Black Caesar (Larry Cohen, 1973).

From Royal Python to Black Caesar: The Return of the Gangster to Harlem Larry Cohen’s Black Caesar is a compelling example with which to begin my discussion of the developments in black visual representation in more recent African American film. Part blaxploitation, part conventional gangster story, the film borrows from a number of cinematic formulas to tell what appears to be a clichéd story of a gangster’s rise and fall. The film is a less-respected example of the blaxploitation formula than its better-known predecessors, perhaps because it was made on a smaller scale than those, like Shaft (Gordon Parks Sr., 1971) and Super Fly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972), which were made by African American directors with studio backing. Originally written by Cohen— whose previous screen credits included a number of television shows and his feature debut, Bone (1972)—as a star vehicle for Sammy Davis Jr., the screenplay was picked up by American International Pictures when Davis pulled out of the project.10 By this time AIP, which was founded in 1954 as a “releasing company for low budget exploitation films in all genres,”11 expanded into blaxploitation production and was looking to follow up on the moderate success of its first releases in the genre, Slaughter (Jack Starrett, 1972) and blaxploitation-horror hybrid Blacula (William Crain, 1972). With the release of Black Caesar and a few later iterations of the genre, including Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973) and Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974), AIP became one of the main producers and distributors of blaxploitation.12 Black Caesar sticks to formula in many ways: first, it is set, like many blaxploitation films, in an identifiable African American urbanscape.13 In fact, the film was one of the few blaxploitation films shot on location in Harlem (most were shot on the West Coast). Cohen’s guerrilla approach to filmmaking

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(shooting on the fly, with a small crew and no permits) ensured an immediacy and veracity that were very much a part of the genre’s aura and were further shored up by numerous shots of the neighborhood’s iconic monuments, including 125th Street and the Apollo Theater. The story focuses on a strong black antihero who, despite his criminal behavior, tries to succeed in a white world made up of Italian American mobsters and corrupt police. As in many blaxploitation films, a well-known black athlete plays the lead. Such casting, in this case football hero Fred “The Hammer” Williamson as Tommy Gibbs, gave the character an even more commanding presence as a powerful black male role model.14 Finally, in the tradition of previous films like Sweetback, Shaft, and Super Fly, the film’s soundtrack contributed an additional appeal by featuring popular contemporary African American performers, such as James Brown. Blaxploitation films often combined elements of other genres, with the detective film influencing Cotton Comes to Harlem and Shaft, the road movie guiding Sweetback, and the crime film more generally shaping Super Fly and The Mack (Michael Campus, 1973). With Black Caesar we see a continuation of this hybridity, particularly with the gangster genre, one of the few times that the iconic gangster appeared in blaxploitation film. The film tells the story of Tommy Gibbs, a street kid who works his way up the ranks of Harlem’s Italianrun syndicate before meeting his demise at the hands of young local gang members. In this narrative arc, the film presents a fairly conventional gangster story and, in fact, it has been linked (and links itself) in name and narrative to the genre’s classic films, including Little Caesar (Mervin LeRoy, 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932). From the former, Black Caesar draws not only its title but also the construction of an antihero with outsized ambition and a lack of understanding of the rules of the game. From the latter, the film models Tommy after Tony Camonte (Paul Muni), an outsider with an all-encompassing ambition to be the top crime boss in the city regardless of what it does to those around him. In keeping with these references, the film draws much of its iconography from the gangster films of the 1930s; for example, even though most of Black Caesar is set in the 1960s and early ’70s, Gibbs’s sartorial choices of three-piece suits and pork-pie hats give him the appearance of a gangster from another era. Additionally, his guns of choice include an outdated pistol and a Thompson machine gun, the signature sidearms of earlier gangsters. Such weaponry also distinguishes him from the prevailing black “militant” iconography of the time; the Black Panthers, for example, were often photographed with Russian-made rifles. Tommy’s overall appearance, hence, connotes a different time (and may have made him less threatening than present-day symbols of black male empowerment). This mixture of generic conventions, particularly those that refract the iconography of different places and times, suggests a blurring of past and present not normally associated with either the blaxploitation film or the classic

FIGURE 20. “Godfather of Harlem!,” press poster for Black Caesar (American International Pictures, 1973).

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gangster film. Such temporal shifting is extended to the narrative itself, which marks, through titles, three separate points in Tommy’s life; 1953, 1965, and 1972. Moreover, the titles suggest, through the linkage between personal narrative and location shooting, the connections between social (the neighborhood) and personal (Tommy) history. In this way Black Caesar not only gestures backward to earlier historical moments, but also it links them to the present (with the additional help of certain aesthetics of immediacy: location shooting, popular music, and contemporary urban vernacular). Black Caesar opens with the date, “September 1953,” and a shot of a fourteen-year-old Tommy (Omer Jeffrey) shining the shoes of a white mobster. Tommy’s actions turn deadly as he prevents the man from fleeing when he is set upon and assassinated by a rival mobster. The sequence continues with Tommy delivering money to a corrupt cop named McKinney (Art Lund). McKinney, believing that Tommy has stolen money from the envelope, beats the teen, sending him to the hospital with a broken leg. From there Tommy ends up in a juvenile detention center. As with many gangster films, these early scenes provide background explaining the young man’s future behavior. Here we see Tommy’s willingness to work for the mob, his first encounter with McKinney, and his overall ambition for more. This latter element is, significantly, communicated through a discussion between Tommy and his friend Joe (Michael Jeffrey), whom the former orders to continue in school to acquire the business skills that that will be useful in the future. Significantly, and this marks a difference from the films discussed in the previous chapter, the childhood scenes do not suggest that Tommy’s actions are directly related to his environment; for example, no mention is made of his home life, and the young Tommy is wellspoken and intelligent. They do, however, establish McKinney and Joe as recurring figures in the gangster’s life. The next scene opens with a title establishing the date as “October 23, 1965,” eight years after Tommy’s beating and incarceration. We see a now-adult Tommy, dressed in suit and hat, enter a barbershop and assassinate a white mobster. Tommy is not yet affiliated with any organized crime family, and he uses the murder as a means of gaining an introduction to Cardoza (Val Avery), the city’s leading crime boss. Tommy impresses the man with his willingness to do anything to succeed, his ability to speak Sicilian, his savvy understanding of the mob’s racism, and his readiness to act the Uncle Tom by working within Cardoza’s racist parameters (which include his being paid less than the mobster’s white henchmen for the same work). The pair devise a deal that gives Tommy control over a block in Harlem in exchange for doing Cardoza’s dirty work. What follows is a classic gangster montage of Tommy walking the streets, shooting machine guns, and murdering mobsters, set to the lyrics of James Brown’s “The Boss.” While the combination of images illustrates Tommy’s rising influence in the city’s criminal underground, it also foreshadows his eventual

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demise, a suggestion that’s made in other key moments early in the film. In one scene, for example, Tommy manages to bribe a now-older McKinney by having Joe (Phillip Roye) provide the police officer with a stock portfolio. Upon closing the deal, Tommy accompanies his lawyer back to the attorney’s Upper East Side apartment and buys the place in its entirety for his mother, who had previously been employed as the lawyer’s maid. When his mother learns of his actions, she rejects Tommy’s offer and begins a downward spiral that eventually leads to her death. From this point forward the narrative covers a span of seven years and details a series of violent power grabs and betrayals fueling Tommy’s rise to power and leading to his ruin on August 20, 1972. One of the earliest betrayals occurs when Tommy decides to take over Cardoza’s—and the Italians’—Harlem business. First, he kills his old boss, and then he sends his men to the West Coast to assassinate the remainder of the Cardozas at their family compound, a space that visually recalls Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972).15 Once he manages to rid himself of the Cardozas, Tommy makes a deal with the national syndicate for control of Harlem. Members of the syndicate, who are opposed to giving so much power to an African American man, agree to Tommy’s proposal only after he promises to keep the blacks and Puerto Ricans in New York and other cities “in line.” According to Tommy, “Who’s going to control these people? . . . It’s a jungle and it takes a jungle bunny to run it. . . . Things will be quiet in the ghetto.” Tommy’s words are an ironic illustration of Killen’s opening arguments in Harlem Stirs: “If the ‘jungle’ did not exist, then there would be no need for civilizing it, hence no smoke screen for exploitation.”16 While Tommy’s actions against Cardoza and the syndicate—if they conform to generic conventions—should lead to a gang war and his downfall, the narrative suggests a much larger betrayal is responsible for the gangster’s demise. First, his actions go unpunished by the national syndicate and, in fact, his assertions of control over the neighborhood convince the Italians to accede to Tommy’s wishes (it helps that he’s content with extortion and does not want to control more lucrative areas, like the drug trade). Following his takeover of Harlem, Tommy becomes more involved in amassing wealth and possessions, and in the process he alienates his friends and family—his best friend Joe becomes increasingly frustrated with his lack of interest in putting some of his profits to positive use in the neighborhood (for example, by funding youth centers); his girlfriend Helen is estranged by his increasingly violent behavior; his father reappears only to ultimately reject his son; and Tommy’s mother dies of heartbreak. Tommy’s rise and fall is precipitated by his desire to reach the top of the syndicate by any means necessary. More important, he is motivated not so much by a hunger for power as by a desire for the material possessions he was denied as a child in Harlem. While he never mentions such childhood deprivation,

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his actions clearly suggest that Tommy has a desire for luxury goods that are, significantly, coded as “white.” Tommy’s purchase of his lawyer’s apartment is just one example of his conflation of consumer goods with success. He wants the apartment precisely because it is the site of his mother’s subservience and because it is a restricted building (as his mother suggests, the building does not even allow “Jewish folk”). Elsewhere in the film, Tommy purchases gifts from Tiffany and Bergdorf Goodman, the objects clearly symbolizing his successful transition from Harlem delinquent to another class stratum. But, such gestures are often rejected, indicating that members of Tommy’s circle do not recognize either the status of such appurtenances or their false promise of integration into American society. While Black Caesar, according to Cohen, may have been intended as a “homage to the Warner Brothers gangster movies”17 of the thirties, there is no doubt that the filmmaker was cognizant of the demands of the blaxploitation formula on the one hand, and of larger discourses in the African American community on the other. (Cohen was hired to direct the film because he was seen, at least by the executives at AIP following the success of Bone, as a director who worked well with black actors.) Tony Williams argues, for example, that the film is infused “with contemporary themes and radical nuances.”18 I would concur, and suggest that the film’s engagement with contemporary issues is enacted through Tommy’s relationship with two men in particular, Joe and McKinney. These relationships, along with the film’s conclusion, conjoin many of the themes of Making a Promised Land, particularly African American representation, black urban masculinity, and political and economic empowerment. Tommy and Joe’s friendship draws heavily from the classic gangster setup between hero and sidekick. Like Little Caesar’s relationship between Caesar “Rico” Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) and Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), Tommy and Joe’s friendship is part business, part criminal, and part conscience. In both cases, the alliance ends in betrayal. The pair’s partnership is established in the opening scene, during which Tommy orders Joe to stay in school as a means of enabling his future rather than his friend’s. As the adult Tommy acquires power, he enlists Joe as his legal and financial adviser. Joe does so willingly, but with the mistaken belief that Tommy shares his desire to contribute some of his profits to the neighborhood, just as the numbers bankers of decades before funneled money back to Harlem’s residents. Joe’s desire to “invest in the community” is a constant refrain in the film, and it is Tommy’s continuing deferment of making good on his promise that creates a tension between the two men—one that results in Joe’s ultimate betrayal of Tommy with Helen, as well as his accusation that his old friend is nothing more than a “white nigger” for his lack of interest in his own community. Tommy has disappointed not only his own generation, but by refusing to provide the people of Harlem with, in Joe’s words, a “fair shake,” he’s circumscribing future

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generations. In this sense we see an important shift in the figure of the black gangster. No long a race man, the gangster is only interested in the acquisition of wealth. Like Tommy’s relationship with Joe, his connection with McKinney extends back in time and involves a set of recurring tensions. While McKinney is not to blame for Tommy’s early delinquency (and the narrative makes a half-hearted attempt to suggest it may have been due to an absent father), the police officer’s violent racism and disregard for the law have direct effects on Tommy’s adult life, from his permanent limp (a result of the earlier beating) to his desire to exact control over the older man. The pair’s contempt for each other reaches its zenith near the end of the film, when McKinney confronts a wounded Tommy and forces the younger man to shine his shoes in a reenactment of Tommy’s childhood powerlessness. Tommy turns the tables on the police officer and brutally beats him. While the beating itself would be enough to avenge McKinney’s past treatment, the point is made more directly through intercuts of footage of the earlier scene. The most telling element of this scene, however, occurs immediately prior to the beating, when Tommy forces McKinney to blacken up his face and sing “Dixie.” While McKinney’s blackface beating might be nothing more than a blaxploitation nod to the history of racialized representation, its inclusion in the film is unsettling because it is so out of place in the narrative. For example, the shoeshine box refers to Tommy’s youth, and yet McKinney’s beating of Tommy takes place in another scene and does not include the box. There’s no doubt, however, that it is meant to signify the power relationship between the two men, and black and white men more broadly. McKinney’s demand for a shine in the later scene is thus his attempt to wrest power from Tommy. The younger man’s ultimate response, however, takes the narrative someplace else altogether. On the one hand, forcing McKinney into blackface initiates a visual connection to the history of African American representation and stereotype. And yet, the fact that the beating is given by one “white nigger” to another (McKinney in blackface) destabilizes any clear-cut reading of the scene. Perhaps it was meant as nothing more than an easy strategy for eliciting cheers from appreciative blaxploitation audiences of the time, but the fact remains that what appears to be Tommy’s victory is not. This last point is best made by the film’s conclusion. After beating McKinney, Tommy inexplicably heads to his old neighborhood. An earlier scene between Tommy and his father has revealed that the neighborhood is in ruins— his old apartment building is abandoned and stands amid rubble-strewn lots and empty buildings. The scene highlights the area’s impoverished conditions at the time of production and is a telling illustration of the neighborhood’s decline from promised land to wasteland. As Tommy returns alone to the neighborhood, he is left without the protection of his weapon (which he dropped

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FIGURE 21. Tommy Gibbs (Fred Williamson) returns to his childhood home in Black Caesar (American International Pictures, 1973).

earlier in the film) or his reputation: as he makes his way to his building, he is beaten and robbed by a group of teenagers, none of whom recognize the “Godfather of Harlem.” Blaxploitation and gangster conventions work hand-in-hand throughout most of the film, but Black Caesar’s conclusion suggests that the combination of forms was not always compatible. In the film’s original ending; for example, Tommy is beaten and left for dead by the young members of a street gang. Such an ending would accord with classical gangster conventions, in which the hero’s downfall is precipitated by his personal flaws (even in a post–Production Code environment). This conclusion could even work within a blaxploitation narrative if Tommy’s ending is read through a framework of race pride in which he meets his demise because he refused to contribute positively to the neighborhood. In this scenario, Tommy’s death would be understandable because he has forsaken the community in his relentless pursuit of profit. But because of “negative audience reaction,” Cohen recut the ending to make Tommy’s demise more ambiguous: the beating ends on a shot of the prone gangster, lying among rubble, before cutting away to a long shot of the midtown Manhattan skyline in the distance.19 Regardless of whether we read the conclusion as Tommy’s total comeuppance—in other words, his death—or a momentary downturn in his fortunes, the most significant aspect of the scene remains. Tommy, the oldfashioned gangster, is helpless when facing the young gang members who have taken over his old neighborhood. Tommy’s demise, therefore, is radically moral and old-fashioned for a blaxploitation film. He suffers because he is selfish and unwilling to invest in the neighborhood’s future.

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“Living in the City”: African American Film after Blaxploitation The blaxploitation boom of the early 1970s provided a brief moment during which African American talent—directors, writers, actors—actively put stories featuring black neighborhoods and people on movie screens. While many of the films relied on Hollywood principles of target marketing, including low budgets and recognizable generic conventions, there were moments, as suggested by Black Caesar, in which the films broke from convention and explored the intertwined issues of filmic representation, genre, aesthetics, and politics. Overall, the cycle of films has either been celebrated or dismissed for its representations of black heteronormative masculinity and criminality; and scholars on both sides of the debate have offered compelling analyses of different films from the time, particularly Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Super Fly. What has been less frequently considered is the way in which the cycle envisioned the contemporary cityspace, and how this might have impacted subsequent city films. Making the Promised Land has traced Harlem’s presence in American photography and film from the late nineteenth century onward and has argued that contemporary depictions of the area were more likely to appear in the former (portraiture, street journalism, and the photo-text) than in the latter. When the neighborhood was used as a location for films, its space was often implied rather than real (as in black gangster films from the 1930s and ’40s) or it appeared in nonfiction films or docudramas focused on exposing the ills of the city. Blaxploitation, for better or worse, provided some of the earliest examples of a cinematic—in other words, multisensory and moving— contemporary Harlem. Shot on location, these films celebrated the neighborhood, while also directly or indirectly acknowledging its growing blight; the former through narratives of crime, poverty, and drug use and the latter through shots of Harlem’s empty lots, boarded-up buildings, and garbage-filled streets. Additionally, they provided audiences with a point of view that was both intimate and immediate, one that eschewed nostalgia for a bourgeois Renaissance past for the everyday sights and sounds of a city, one that was less polished and promising than its earlier iterations. Unfortunately, when Hollywood’s attention began to focus elsewhere and blaxploitation production decreased, Harlem disappeared from the screen. To be sure, the disappearance of blaxploitation affected more than just the number of films set in Harlem; it affected the entirety of black filmmaking. Once Hollywood moved into the production of blockbusters in the mid-1970s, there was very little money or interest left for stories featuring black characters in significant roles, and black directors were hard-pressed to find work in the industry. One of the rare exceptions to this was filmmaker Michael Schultz, who was never associated with the blaxploitation cycle or with Harlem films, but

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who made titles with African American characters and storylines consistently through the 1970s and ’80s. Except for Schultz, most of the other African American filmmakers who enjoyed some success during the early part of the 1970s found fewer opportunities to make films after 1975. It would be another decade, for example, before figures like Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks again worked in film. What little Hollywood interest that remained for African American characters was channeled into comedies featuring stars like Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, the most visible comedians working in film and television at this time.20 Despite Schultz’s productivity, a true resurgence of black filmmaking did not occur until the mid-1980s, with Stan Lathan’s Beat Street (1984) and Schultz’s Krush Groove (1985). Both films were hip hop musicals that explored the budding music, fashion, and art of New York’s African American and Latino youth in the South Bronx and Brooklyn. Neither Beat Street nor Krush Groove, however, was the first to focus on New York’s urban subcultures. That credit goes to artist Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 docudrama, Wild Style. Ahearn’s film was a low-budget collaboration among local, mostly South Bronx, artists, emcees, and musicians such as hip hop/graffiti artist Fab 5 Freddy (Freddy Braithwaite), graffiti artist George “Lee” Quinones, emcee Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Saddler), and musician Chris Stein (of the group Blondie). It loosely tells the story of a graffiti artist’s reluctant brush with success within the downtown art scene. Wild Style is significant here for its focus on popular aesthetics and a narrative that selfconsciously bridged the gap between New York’s art world and hip hop culture, a melding of downtown and uptown cultural scenes that was occurring at the time (and which we already saw with Shirley Clarke and the production of The Cool World). Despite the fact that the film had limited exposure and modest profits—it debuted at the New York New Directors/New Films festival before having a brief though successful run in a Times Square theater—it was a critical success with far-reaching aesthetic affects. Its combination of the low-budget, realist aesthetics of location shooting, grainy cinematography, direct sound, and nonprofessional actors was in keeping with urban realism of the past few decades; however, its focus on hip hop and graffiti, and on African American and Latino youth celebrating their surroundings in vibrant rhythms and colors, was something new (these were not the adult pimps, dealers, and tough guys of blaxploitation). Wild Style and Style Wars (Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, 1983), a well-received PBS documentary with similar subject matter, put their fingers on the pulse of urban America, and the studios were quick to follow with their own versions of the formula.21 Beat Street and Krush Groove appeared not long after Wild Style and Style Wars. Both were examples of studio-financed, black-directed hip hop projects that self-consciously pulled elements from the earlier films while also relying on classical Hollywood conventions to appeal to a larger audience. From the former

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they took urban narratives and actual performers and personalities to add immediacy and authenticity to their fictional stories; from the latter they borrowed the conventions of the romantic musical and the biopic (respectively). Beat Street was produced by Harry Belafonte (who also contributed to the soundtrack) and directed by Stan Lathan, a highly respected television director. It stars Rae Dawn Chong as a classically trained dancer and choreographer who becomes romantically involved with an up-and-coming hip hop deejay (Guy Davis), whom she meets after admiring his younger brother’s break-dancing skills. The film follows the conventions of the musical romance, with star- and class-crossed lovers overcoming their differences through a shared love of music and dance and an interest in collaboration. The change from earlier iterations of the cycle is that they rise above their disaccord through hip hop, break dancing, and a mutual understanding of graffiti as an art form rather than as an act of vandalism. Professional actors formed the majority of the cast, although the film includes performances by actual hip hop artists, such as Melle Mel (as Grandmaster Melle Mel) and Afrika Bambaataa, and enough location shooting to lend it an air of authenticity. Moreover, the film was a financial success: made for approximately $5 million, it grossed $16 million for Orion Pictures in its first six weeks, a testament to the growing cross-over popularity of hip hop culture and the growing appeal of teen films more generally.22 Krush Groove was released a year later and, building on the narrative, aural, and visual aesthetics of the earlier films, set the tone for what would eventually be a new wave in African American filmmaking. The film loosely tells the story of the founding of Def Jam Records by Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin and features a combination of established and emerging African American talent. Doug McHenry and George Jackson produced it with the assistance of Russell Simmons, who brought a number of Def Jam performers to the project.23 The film was directed by Michael Schultz, who had a reputation for making musicals or films with musical components, such as Carwash (1976), Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), and The Last Dragon (1985). It stars Blair Underwood as “Russel Walker,” a character based on Russell Simmons; however, most of the roles are played by rappers and performers such as Run-DMC, the Fat Boys, New Edition, the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and Sheila E, with Simmons and Rubin playing small roles in the film. It was shot in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and various locations in Manhattan by newcomer Ernest Dickerson, whose next film would be Spike Lee’s feature debut, She’s Gotta Have It (1986). Like Beat Street, Krush Groove was profitable, earning Warner Bros. $11 million in its first six weeks on an original $3 million investment. Warner Bros. Records released its soundtrack the same year and, like those for Wild Style and Beat Street, its profitability contributed to the film’s overall financial and critical success.24 While none of the hip hop films mentioned above were set in Harlem, they exhibit the effects of two important developments in African American urban

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demographics and aesthetics. First, they belatedly acknowledge, perhaps for the first time on celluloid, a migration of New York City’s African American population. For decades Brooklyn had sizable black communities, particularly in neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant; however, Harlem continues to be considered the city’s African American epicenter, a fact related more to its historical significance than to actual demographics.25 By locating itself, partially at least, in Brooklyn, Krush Groove gave audiences a new African American urbanscape, one which that soon become more familiar through the films of Spike Lee (and which had already been captured through Dickerson’s lens in Lee’s 1984 thesis film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop). It also mapped the city’s Latino population, particularly by providing a look at the South Bronx that was far less dystopian than that rendered by an earlier film, Fort Apache, the Bronx (Daniel Petrie, 1981), in which the neighborhood was obtained through the eyes of a jaded police officer. Second, the films suggested a change in the style and substance of African American film and popular culture, especially that located in urban areas. To be sure, location shooting, direct sound, contemporary soundtracks, and the use of singers and dancers was not new in African American filmmaking, as my previous discussions of race films, blaxploitation, and other films suggest. What was innovative in the hip hop musicals was their focus on and celebration of the youthful exuberance of African American and Latino artists and musicians involved in making art out of their everyday surroundings (much of which was marked by the same blight seen in urban films from the preceding few decades). The films may have incorporated the aesthetics of immediacy into their narratives through their urban locations and casting of actual personalities, but they did so to tell a different sort of story than the action and crime films from the previous decade. The heroes were younger, and the narratives, for better or worse, were focused less on direct action against racism and more on communicating a particular urban, post–civil rights, postindustrial point of view that was, at times, celebratory of urban culture.

The Crack(s) in Striver’s Row: Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever It was from within this environment that filmmaker Spike Lee emerged. Lee was not the first to put either Brooklyn or hip hop culture onto film, but the success of his feature debut, She’s Gotta Have It (1986) solidified the influence of hip hop culture on African American film in particular and American culture more generally. Lee’s loving portrait of Brooklyn, shot by Dickerson in beautiful blackand-white film stock (with a color section), offered a new view of the African American city, one that contained pleasant living spaces and a diversity of black people spanning class, education, and sexual preference. Indeed, it presented a viable model of middle-class urban living.

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While Lee’s subsequent films, especially Do the Right Thing (1989), Crooklyn (1994), Clockers (1995), and He Got Game (1999) solidified the director’s connections to Brooklyn among critics and fans, he has explored a number of neighborhoods in New York, including the Bronx, lower Manhattan, and Harlem. Jungle Fever (1991), for example, is partially set in a (then) present-day Harlem, and many of its scenes were shot on location in the neighborhood. The film marks a departure from my focus on crime films; however, it is relevant for the present discussion of Harlem films for a variety of reasons. First, it contains a strain of Harlem nostalgia that extends beyond Black Caesar’s generic references to the past. Jungle Fever also acknowledges the area’s history, though it is used to further the narrative by exploring the role of the black bourgeoisie in the city. Second, the film includes some early references to one of the main elements devastating the neighborhood—and African American urban communities more broadly: crack cocaine. By combining the past with the present, Jungle Fever offers a compelling meditation on the promise and perils of the black city. It also serves as an introduction to New Jack City, a film also set in the neighborhood that deals more directly with the effects of crack on both dealers and users. The following discussion will focus, therefore, on Jungle Fever and New Jack City, with particular attention paid to the ways in which they use history to structure their narratives of contemporary Harlem. By all accounts, Jungle Fever is about miscegenation. The film tells the story of the ill-fated relationship between a married African American architect named Flipper Styles (Wesley Snipes) and his young Italian American secretary, Angie Tucci (Annabella Sciorra). The relationship is doomed for many reasons, not the least of which is because the attraction between the two protagonists is based on race and class differences rather than physical or emotional chemistry (Flipper is a proud member of the black bourgeoisie while Angie is a product of working-class, Italian American Bensonhurst, Brooklyn). Further, the couple’s relationship is cursed by their respective communities, who for a variety of reasons (from practicality to race hatred) cannot envision crossing the real and imaginary borders of the racial, social, and geographic urbanscape. Lee prompted such a reading of the film, moreover, both in interviews leading up to and following its opening. For Lee, Jungle Fever was an attempt to explore longstanding “sexual myths” in which white women believe that black men are “studs” and black men see white women as the “epitome of beauty.”26 Miscegenation between black men and white women has been a coupling that has haunted the United States for centuries and, at its worst, led to violent attacks, lynching, and other forms of racial violence (much of it psychological as well as physical), often on the basis of rumor rather than fact.27 Jungle Fever reminds us of this in its opening frame, a photo of and dedication to Yusef Hawkins, an African American teenager who was shot and killed in Bensonhurst in 1989 by a mob of mostly Italian American male youths who had heard a rumor

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that a (white) girl from the neighborhood was dating an African American man.28 In fact, Hawkins, from Brooklyn’s East New York section, was only in Bensonhurst to look at a used car; he knew neither the girl in question nor his attackers. The opening image is technically extradiegetic, appearing as it does outside of the narrative proper, and yet its presence sets the tone for the following story and acts as an uncanny presence in the diegesis.29 Jungle Fever’s dedication to Hawkins reminds us of miscegenation’s dangers, real and imagined. It then graphically illustrates its point in the opening credits, which map two very different neighborhoods, Flipper’s “Harlem, USA” and Angie’s Bensonhurst. After the image of Hawkins fades to black, Stevie Wonder’s “Jungle Fever” rises in volume on the soundtrack and accompanies credits designed as street signs that float across shots of the city. The opening is polyphonic, with song, text, sound effects, and image providing important details about the production, the narrative, the characters, and, most important, the place. The city first appears in a long shot of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue), directed south toward Central Park and Midtown Manhattan. The shots move gradually closer and begin to alternate between street scenes of Harlem and street scenes of Bensonhurst. While the former neighborhood is relatively recognizable by virtue of its avenues, brownstones, sidewalk vendors, and teaming numbers of black people on the streets, the latter—with less familiar iconography—is identified via the floating credits and visuals that include place names and graffiti announcing it as an Italian American community. The credits are wiped away by a graphic map of Harlem’s streets (resembling a New York City subway map), followed by an identifying text, “Harlem,” crawling across the screen before it all dissolves into an establishing shot of a Harlem street. Bensonhurst will be treated in a similar fashion a few scenes later. The film has four locations, with Harlem and Bensonhurst as the main settings, and Manhattan’s Midtown and Greenwich Village neighborhoods making brief appearances, the former as the location of Flipper’s architectural office and the latter as the spot where Flipper and Angie live once they move in together. Each of these spaces connotes important details about the connections between race and space in New York City (for example, the bohemian West Village offers the couple relatively safe shelter when they cohabitate); however, Lee’s evocation of Harlem is of primary interest here, and it starts with the establishing shot of Flipper’s Harlem neighborhood, the storied “Striver’s Row,” which follows the opening credits. Jungle Fever, like most of Lee’s films, is associated with its locations, and the opening credits and the establishing shot clearly identify Harlem as the primary setting for the narrative (the story is basically Flipper’s, as it begins and ends with him). The establishing shot actually consists of three shots that seamlessly mesh together and present a Harlem neighborhood waking to a new day. It begins with a high-angle crane shot of a street lined with townhouses and

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FIGURE 22. Idyllic Striver’s Row in Jungle Fever (Universal Pictures and 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1991).

mature trees. The camera tilts down and focuses on a newspaper delivery boy, who throws a copy of the New York Times (the chosen text marking the stillunidentified reader as middle class). The film then cuts to a slow motion medium shot of the paper spinning in the air and cuts again to it landing on the stoop of a building. From there the camera tilts and tracks up to a second-story window. We enter the apartment through the window and focus on a couple, bathed in the same golden light that defined the outdoor space, having sex. This is our introduction to Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes) and his wife Drew (Lonette McKee). The establishing shot suggests that most of the narrative will play out on Harlem’s streets, but this is not the case. The majority of the scenes located in the neighborhood are either set in the interiors of Flipper’s apartment, his parents’ apartment, or his neighbor’s apartment upstairs. There are few shots of Harlem’s streets, though they do play a vital role in developing the narrative: Striver’s Row, for example appears at the beginning and the ending of the film, and at other times, to reestablish place and to suggest changes in the narrative. Other exteriors include the outside of the Good Reverend and Lucinda Purify’s (Flipper’s parents) apartment building (which retains its early-twentiethcentury grandeur) and Flipper’s daughter’s school, and the spaces through which Flipper travels when he searches for Gator, his crack-addicted brother. Even with these brief glimpses of locations we can see a pattern—and tension— in Lee’s choices of mise-en-scène; one which refers to the legacy of Harlem’s past and the other to the “realities” of Harlem’s present. First, let’s consider the past. The film opens with two acknowledgments of the past, the relatively recent history of the Hawkins’s case (which had no direct

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relationship with the actual space of Harlem), and the more distant history associated with the Striver’s Row setting. While the exact location of Flipper’s apartment is not identified, the street’s particular architecture, with its pale brick townhouses functions as a sort of chronotope in the Bakhtinian sense in that it provides the narrative with a specific spatio-temporal foundation that is at once contemporary and historical. Striver’s Row, in brief, was constructed in the late nineteenth century by property developer David H. King Jr. (also known for building the original Madison Square Garden and the base of the Statue of Liberty). The houses, part of a development originally known as the “King Model Houses,” are located on 138th and 139th Streets between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Frederick Douglass Boulevards (Eighth Avenue). King commissioned a number of architectural firms to design residential buildings for the project, including Stanford White for McKim, Mead and White, Clarence S. Luce, and James Lord Brown and Bruce Price. Originally intended as upscale residences for the neighborhood’s affluent Jewish and German American residents, the development experienced difficulties during the financial panic of the mid-1890s and reverted to its original investor, the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Eventually, the houses were sold to affluent African Americans, and by the 1920s the area was known as “Striver’s Row,” a nickname reflecting the ambitions and status of its residents, many who were prominent members of the black bourgeoisie. The neighborhood’s fortunes declined during the mid-twentieth century, as the black middle class fled the area’s increasing blight and crime, and many of the residences were broken up into apartments and SROs (single-room occupancy or multiple-tenant buildings). Striver’s Row underwent a “renaissance” in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when African American middle-class families like Flipper and Drew started to return to the neighborhood and restore the buildings.30 As an educated, successful, and affluent architect, Flipper Purify fulfills the image of a striver, as does Drew, an educated professional woman with a high-level management position at Macy’s. They live in bourgeois comfort, suggested by a mise-en-scène that conveys understated elegance and affluence. Their upstairs tenants, Cyrus (Spike Lee) and Vera (Veronica Webb), a teacher and businesswoman respectively, live in similar comfort. In many ways, therefore, the characters embody updated versions of the original African American residents of Striver’s Row; black professional classes with economic comfort and race pride. The connection between Striver’s Row—and Flipper in particular—with the black bourgeoisie is more apparent in the figures of his parents, the Good Reverend Doctor (Ossie Davis) and Lucinda Purify (Ruby Dee). The couple resides in a grand apartment building located near Flipper’s Striver’s Row residence (perhaps in Sugar Hill, another Harlem section associated with African American affluence during the 1920s and ’30s). The family home is sprawling and reminiscent of a different time altogether, when Harlem housing was

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intended for large, financially comfortable families. For example, its parlor’s dark paneled walls, heavy drapes, and richly upholstered furniture could have been the interior of any home occupied by the black bourgeoisie during the early twentieth century (and documented in many family portraits, including those by VanDerZee). A well-educated pastor, the Good Reverend is a pious, though flawed, man whose reactions to the behavior of his sons suggest his inability to adjust to contemporary life and the changing community. He’s an old-fashioned man in a new world, a fact that leads us to the film’s engagement with the present. Despite its allusions to the past, Jungle Fever is set in a contemporary context and references some of the effects of the area’s decades-long decline. Shortly after the film’s opening on Striver’s Row, for example, Flipper escorts his daughter, Ming (Veronica Timbers), to school. While the scene features a conversation between father and daughter, the background is much more interesting: The pair is framed in a medium-long shot while they walk along an uneven, rubbish-strewn sidewalk. The background is a series of bricked up buildings in various states of disrepair and covered in graffiti. The next shot shows the pair, still in medium-long shot, walking along the sidewalk adjacent to Ming’s school. In this shot, Flipper and Ming walk toward the camera, surrounded by other parent-child pairs similarly coded as middle class (the parents wear business suits and other clothing associated with white-collar work, and the children are neatly dressed and coiffed). The juxtaposition of the two shots provides viewers with a sense of the neighborhood’s disparities; patches of urban affluence scattered among vast swathes of blight and abandonment. By the time Flipper kisses Ming goodbye outside P.S. 129, the golden hues of the establishing shots have returned, subtly suggesting Lee’s preferred version of Harlem life: middle-class comfort, ambition, and education.31 Flipper covers the same ground at other points in the narrative and the events in his and his family’s lives can be charted by changes in the mise-enscène in these scenes. The second time Flipper takes Ming to school, for example, occurs on the morning after he and Angie first have sex. The shot sequence almost exactly mirrors the first walk, but Flipper is now visibly distracted. The only other variation from the earlier scene occurs in the background of the shot: while the pair passes the same buildings as earlier, the sidewalk contains more trash and the buildings are covered in additional graffiti. As with the previous scene, neither Flipper nor Ming comments on the surroundings, their obliviousness thus suggesting their familiarity with such sights and with the act of ignoring them. The third time Flipper and Ming walk to school, the changes are even more noticeable. It occurs after Flipper and Drew have separated and he has moved to Greenwich Village with Angie, and it follows a slightly different route. Rather than commence with their walk down the blighted street, the scene starts as

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FIGURE 23. Flipper (Wesley Snipes) and Ming’s (Veronica Timbers) second walk to school in Jungle Fever (Universal Pictures and 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1991).

Flipper and Ming move down Striver’s Row in a shot set up that mimics the earlier scenes (they walk left to right in the frame). In this scene, the Stanford White buildings form the background until the pair nears the corner, when the buildings become visibly more neglected and covered in graffiti (suggesting that the area’s “renaissance” does not extend throughout the block). When they reach the corner, a female addict (Halle Berry) offers to give Flipper oral sex in exchange for money. In the next shot (again echoing earlier setups with Flipper and Ming approaching the camera) a visibly shaken Flipper pulls Ming across the street and, in a medium shot, shakes her, demanding that she avoid drugs. The walk ends here, the father-daughter bliss interrupted by outside realities. Jungle Fever’s final scene mirrors this exchange, with a few changes. Flipper leaves the house the morning after reuniting (sexually) with Drew. He follows the same route as in the previous scene, but he is alone. Everything else remains the same until he reaches the corner where another young woman offers him oral sex in exchange for money. Rather than flee, Flipper embraces the young woman, looks to the sky, and yells “No!” The film freezes on his face in close-up and then fades to black. The timing of this final scene is significant in that it follows the climax of the narrative, which is not the dissolution of Flipper and Angie’s relationship, but rather the Good Reverend Doctor’s murder of his crack-addicted son, Gator (Samuel L. Jackson). If we chart the progress of these scenes, Jungle Fever’s focus is as much about the contemporary conditions of the area as it is about miscegenation. Because this aspect of the neighborhood was kept in the background, however, most critics either focused on the love affair between Flipper and Angie or criticized Lee’s treatment of the drug epidemic in African American communities for being too little, too late.

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There is one earlier moment, however, when drugs appear in the foreground. Approximately three-quarters of the way through the film, Flipper, at his mother’s behest, searches for Gator, who has recently stolen a television from his parents’ apartment with the intention of selling it for drug money. Flipper’s search takes him to a neighborhood far different from his Striver’s Row enclave, starting on a street lined with drug dealers and junkies and ending at the “Taj Mahal,” the “Trump Tower for crack heads,” according to a local dealer. The scene begins with the sounds of Stevie Wonder’s “Living in the City” accompanying a low-angle medium shot of a woman holding up a Bible and yelling religious verses to the sky (perhaps registering religion’s impotence in the face of addition, an impotence that is already suggested by the Good Reverend’s and Lucinda’s failure to keep Gator away from drugs). It then cuts to a close-up of Flipper’s face before cutting again to a point-of-view shot as he walks down an unidentified Harlem street. From this perspective the sidewalk is a gauntlet of street life, from dealers, junkies, and prostitutes loitering on curbs and against parked cars to everyday people simply living in the city. The street is lined with abandoned buildings and empty lots, where we (through Flipper’s point of view) catch glimpses of drug dealing and drug use—Lee’s reminder to his audience of the effects of decades of property abandonment by private landlords and public interests. Flipper’s walk down the street is intercut with alternating images, from an unidentified location, of shadows moving across the frame in silhouette or of crack pipes and crack vials littering a floor. After questioning a few people, Flipper completes his journey through the block’s obstacle course, Stevie Wonder continuing on the soundtrack. The next shot is of the Taj Mahal, an abandoned building located, according to Flipper’s informant, on the corner of 145th Street and Convent Avenue. We have already been introduced to the location through the earlier shots of bodies and crack vials, but we first see the actual location in a shot of Flipper in a trash-strewn alleyway, making his way into a building.32 Once inside, he enters a large, dark hall filled with smoke, trash, and drug-addled human beings in various states of excitement, distress, or stupor: a mixed-race collection of the desperate and the addicted that includes Gator. After an exchange between the two brothers, Flipper leaves the building without his brother, and the sequence ends with shots of the same moving silhouettes with crack pipes and used crack vials as those with which it opened. It is only at this point, after almost eight minutes of screen time, that Stevie Wonder’s voice finally fades from the soundtrack. While many critics have commented on the scene’s stylish rendering of drug abuse and despair, even describing it as a “scene out of Dante,” the Taj Mahal’s importance lies beyond its appearance.33 Through Flipper’s walks with Ming and the Taj Mahal scene, Lee offers a compelling commentary not only on the state of contemporary Harlem, but on the ways in which two

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seemingly disparate situations, striving and hopelessness, can coexist within one storied space, a recurring theme of narratives set in the neighborhood. By also linking the present with the past—through references to Striver’s Row and Harlem’s Talented Tenth in particular—Jungle Fever presents a twofold argument. First, it suggests that contemporary blight and ruination exists along the neighborhood’s storied streets. Second, and perhaps more important, it asserts through the troubled lives of the Good Reverend Doctor and his sons Flipper and Gator, that Harlem’s contemporary problems may have roots in its glorious past or, at least, in the striver’s turn from the area’s problems earlier in the neighborhood’s history. Unfortunately, however, the film closes down such an analysis by allowing Flipper to enter and leave the space without any physical or psychological development. In a similar way, the film starts and ends on Striver’s Row, suggesting the continuation of Flipper’s insulated life, despite the fact that he says “no” to crack on his block. Drugs and despair may play a part in the narrative, but ultimately its point of view, because it is centered on Flipper, remains solidly middle class and socially distanced from the area’s problems. As we will see, this will be less the case in New Jack City, where the focus will be a new version of the Harlem gangster, a crack dealer named Nino Brown.

New Crack City: African American Film in the 1990s When Spike Lee made Jungle Fever in 1991, he was responding in part to critics who excoriated him in 1989 for avoiding the problems of drugs in African American communities in Do the Right Thing. Lee’s response at the time of DTRT’s release was to accuse his critics of racism for implying that drugs would be a de facto component of any African American city film. Indeed, the assertion that drugs were part of African American communities was problematic, but Lee’s response to his critics was equally disingenuous, because it either overlooked or willfully ignored the crack epidemic that had been decimating mostly low-income minority communities in Los Angeles, Detroit, San Diego, and New York since the mid-1980s. Crack cocaine reached Harlem by 1985, devastating a community already imperiled by government disinvestment in public institutions (schools and public housing) and a decline in the manufacturing and other jobs that had historically supported the neighborhood’s residents. Jungle Fever alludes to some of these tensions through Gator’s character, and yet its focus on Flipper anchors it neatly within a middle-class milieu of strivers and overachievers. It took other filmmakers to focus more closely on the crack epidemic and those most intimately affected by it, African American youth. And in these films we see a development of the young gang members from Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World from decades before into “gangstas” in charge of highly organized criminal corporations. Indeed, the gangster had returned.

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The same year that Jungle Fever was released, a record number of films made by African American filmmakers, including John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood, Matty Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklyn, and Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City were produced. The films, often called “hood,” “ghetto action,” or “New Jack cinema” set the stage for a black film “renaissance” of sorts as studios, buoyed by the success of filmmakers like Lee, Robert Townsend, and the Hudlin brothers in the late 1980s began investing in projects with African American characters and stories. The most popular narratives were coming-of-age tales set in inner-city neighborhoods like South Central Los Angeles or New York’s Brooklyn and Harlem, in part reflecting the youth and cultural foci of their directors (Singleton, for example, was twenty-three when he directed Boyz; Rich was twenty when he made Brooklyn), many of whom were influenced by hip hop and rap music, particularly gangsta rap.34 The films focused predominantly on young African American men, leading lives marked by criminality, violence, and an overall sense of nihilism. Many directors, mirroring the hip hop culture from which they were drawing, incorporated elements of Hollywood genres into their inner-city narratives. The most common generic elements came from the gangster film; however, the gangster had morphed into the gangsta, a young, urban criminal with nothing much to lose.35 Most of the hood films from the early 1990s were set in the South Central or Watts sections of Los Angeles or the Bed-Stuy, Red Hook, or East New York sections of New York’s Brooklyn—the latter, as with Lee’s films, reflecting larger demographic shifts of New York’s African American population, which saw an overall decline in Harlem and an increase in other parts of the city, especially Brooklyn.36 There were, however, a few films set in Harlem, most notably New Jack City (1991), which many critics consider to be the first of the hood films, and Juice, Ernest Dickerson’s directorial debut from 1992. And while both films are relevant here, I will focus on New Jack City precisely because it raises a number of issues central to my consideration of Harlem films from this time.37 First, how does the film engage with the changing African American urbanscape, especially one that is located in such a storied and overdetermined neighborhood as Harlem? Second, in what way does the film dialogue with genre, particularly the gangster film? While New Jack City is most often discussed as the product of its young director’s (Mario Van Peebles) vision, the film was actually the result of a collaboration of individuals from both within and outside the industry. It was produced by George Jackson and Doug McHenry, who began working together in the mid-1980s when they produced Krush Groove. New Jack City was Jackson and McHenry’s second feature, and according to McHenry, they “always wanted to make a smart gangster picture.”38 The pair hired Thomas Lee Wright and then Barry Michael Cooper to write the screenplay. Wright was a studioexecutive-turned-screenwriter whose previous projects included the original

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story treatment for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part III and The Last of the Finest (1990), a little-seen film about disgraced LAPD cops seeking vengeance against drug dealers, and New Jack City incorporates elements of both genres— the gangster and the rogue cop film. Cooper was a journalist for the Village Voice, who had received acclaim for a 1987 story about the crack epidemic in Detroit. Titled “Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young,” the article was one of the first exposés of the effects of the crack epidemic on inner-city communities. Mario Van Peebles, who at this time was an actor and television director, was hired by Jackson and McHenry, the latter of whom suggests, “George and I really directed the story and everything pretty much from our heads; that was really a producer-driven movie. . . . I told the film’s director, Mario Van Peebles, what we wanted. We knew exactly what we wanted.”39 McHenry claims that the film’s main character, Nino Brown, was based on a “composite of three people, including a notorious Harlem organized crime figure found guilty in 1977 of drug trafficking . . . a guy in Oakland who was reported to have applied MBA techniques to dope dealing . . . [and] a young dealer in Washington, D.C. who was busted with two million dollars on him.”40 And while there may truth in McHenry’s claims (especially regarding the Harlem crime figure, Frank Lucas, who would become the subject of his own film, American Gangster, in 2007), the bulk of the story can be credited to Cooper, who based a number of the characters and story elements on details from his article about Detroit’s crack junkies and the “New Jack” gangsters who were more than happy to supply them with cheap drugs. The article and the film share a focus on drugs and the inner city. They also share an interest in the young nihilistic gangster, a figure who would become a common element of hood films and rap music in the 1990s. So, what role does Harlem play in New Jack City, especially if the film is based on events and people from Detroit? In many respects, the film is not dependent on Harlem for narrative coherence, a fact that makes it different from many of the earlier films discussed in Making a Promised Land. Unlike other Harlem films, for example, the filmmakers eschew shots of classic Harlem iconography, such as the Apollo Theatre or 125th Street. New Jack City, instead, opens with an establishing shot of downtown Manhattan’s iconic skyline (filmed in an aerial shot), before the camera swoops over lower Manhattan and Midtown via a bird’s-eye view over rooftops and city streets. The opening sequence ends on the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, where a man is being dangled by his feet over the edge by Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) and his enforcer, Duh Duh Man (Bill Nunn). After a brief exchange, in which it’s made clear that the dangling man owes Nino money, the scene cuts to another overhead shot similar to the earlier views of Midtown. In this shot, however, tenements and rubble-strewn empty lots have replaced the high-rises. A title reads, “The City 1986,” and the narrative begins.

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While Harlem does not appear these opening shots, there are a number of elements that suggest an inner-city—or “New Jack”—point of view that links the film to African American neighborhoods like Harlem during this time. Prior to the shift to the tenements and empty lots, for example, the soundtrack sets the tone for the following story. From the opening shot, the visuals are accompanied by rapper Queen Latifah singing “For the Love of Money/Living for the City.” The soundtrack also includes sound bites of various news reports relating information about social and economic conditions in the city. An announcer reports, for example, “unemployment is up,” while another states that “economists say that economic inequality is at its worst level since the days of the Great Depression.” The reports alternate between providing a general economic overview of the postindustrial city and topics—drugs, crime, violence—more specific to the film’s narrative: “A drive-by shooting in Harlem resulted in the death of a seven-year-old boy. Police say the shooting was drugrelated.” Another reports, “The bodies of three young black men were discovered in Marcus Garvey Park [in Harlem]. Police believe the three were victims of a drug deal gone bad.” Such visual and aural polyphony suggests a domestic war zone in uptown Manhattan, a connection made literal through the soundtrack’s references to Harlem and by the camera’s movement from the bottom to the top of the frame in aerial shots. The text may say, “The City,” but almost everything else says Harlem. New Jack City’s narrative is split between two plots, the rise of the “Cash Money Brothers (CMB),” a highly organized Harlem drug ring, and the group of self-proclaimed “New Jack” detectives charged with their apprehension. Despite McHenry’s claims about the origins of the story, and Wright’s involvement in the screenplay, the film shows the influence of Cooper’s article in its characterization of the members and organizational structure of the CMB. Cooper’s feature provided more than an overview of the multifaceted effects of crack on the residents of Detroit; it also introduced “Young Boys Incorporated,” a domestic drug organization founded by Detroit natives, Mark Marshall and Raymond Peoples. According to Cooper, Marshall and Peoples created YBI in the late 1970s, when Detroit had been all but abandoned by the black middle class. Initially a corner heroin operation, the organization began selling cheap crack in 1982 and grew to more than three hundred employees by the early 1980s. The YBI, writes Cooper, “was run like a military outfit, organized into soldiers (street dealers), lieutenants, and the ‘A-Team’ (enforcement).” The YBI disbanded by the mid-1980s (the result of inter- and intra-gang warfare and arrests), but at its height it was “more like a 400 million dollar corporation [its estimated gross in 1981]” than an underground drug operation.41 Like the YBI, the Cash Money Brothers start as a small-time corner operation run by Nino and his partner Gee Money (Allen Payne). Soon the duo discovers the moneymaking potential of crack cocaine, and their organization grows with their profits.

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The film jumps in time (signaled by a title card, “1989”), by which time CMB has commandeered an apartment building the size of a city block (similar to Jungle Fever’s “Taj Mahal”), installed its own labs, and employed, in the words of Gee Money, “three hundred employees,” including MBAs and other professionals. There’s no doubt that the film references and refracts contemporary African American life, particularly living conditions in the city during the 1980s. This is accomplished both on the level of aesthetics and themes. First, the film utilizes location shooting, handheld camera, and rapid editing to create a sense of immediacy. The streets of Harlem make up the majority of the mise-en-scène (though specific street markers are missing) and costumes reflect the moments in which the film is set, 1986 and 1989 respectively (characters, for example, wear Adidas track suits, Kangol hats, and large necklaces, much like the performers in Krush Groove from the same time period). This timeliness is further supported by the film’s soundtrack, which features a mixture of popular rappers (including Queen Latifah, Ice T, and The 2 Live Crew) and other aural reminders of the socioeconomic context. Furthermore, the film’s casting draws from all areas of African American popular culture, including music (the use of rapper Ice T as a rogue cop and Fab 5 Freddy and Flavor Flav in small roles), television (director Mario Van Peebles appears as Ice-T’s supervisor), and film, with a number of actors who were fresh from roles in Spike Lee films—among them, Bill Nunn (School Daze, Do the Right Thing and Mo Better Blues), Tracy Camilla Johns (She’s Gotta Have It), and Wesley Snipes (Mo Better Blues), who also appeared in Jungle Fever the same year. The immediacy is further communicated by the film’s narrative, which focuses on the destruction of inner-city neighborhoods struggling in the wake of the drugs, crime, and Reaganomics. In fact, Nino explicitly makes such connections when he observes that “you gotta rob to get rich in the Reagan era,” and whose courtroom speech later in the film identifies a global economic order much larger than one person or community: “I’m not guilty. You’re the one who’s guilty. You lawmakers, the politicians, the Colombian drug lords . . . all you who lobby against making drugs legal. Just like you did with alcohol during Prohibition. You’re the one who’s guilty. Let’s kick the ballistics here. Ain’t no Uzis made in Harlem. Not one of us in here owns a poppy field. This thing is bigger than Nino Brown. This is big business. This is the American way.” Indeed, Nino suggests that the drug trade is more about a global economics and politics than it is about his own greed, and his speech points out the limited opportunities for the youth of Harlem, a neighborhood that had a jobless rate of almost 16 percent in 1990, “twice that of New York City, and twice again as high if we take into account those who dropped out of the labor force and joblessness among teens.”42 In such an environment, the CMB becomes one of the few employers in the neighborhood, eerily updating the numbers bankers’ role of providing opportunities to Harlemites during the 1930s.

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In its observations on American capitalism, New Jack City conforms to one of the central themes of the gangster film. According to Jonathan Munby, “the gangster’s corrupt capitalist practices reveal the exclusionary features of the [Horatio] Alger myth of success. As most gangster films demonstrate, they are less about reinforcing ideals of capitalist success than about the rules and prejudices that bar specific social groups from access to power.”43 Munby is referring to the post-Prohibition gangster film of the 1930s; however, we can see a continuation of the concern with capitalism throughout the twentiethcentury gangster film, particularly in the links drawn between economics and the American Dream. Access to American capitalism (and the assimilationist success it often implies) has been a central component of the African American gangster film over the decades. New Jack City is no different in this regard; however, the film takes a particularly postmodern approach to the subject by self-reflexively foregrounding discourses of deindustrialization, governmental disinterest in the inner city, and alternative economies. And yet, the film, like many gangster films, is ambivalent in its attitude toward big business; it at one and the same time excoriates and fetishizes capitalism. There is no doubt that New Jack City was intended to be, in McHenry’s words, “a smart gangster picture.”44 Indeed McHenry cites a number of different films, including The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970), The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931), and The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) as stylistic inspirations. In addition, the film includes references—verbal and visual—to a number of gangster icons. The former category includes mentions of fiction and nonfiction figures such as George Raft (Scarface, 1932), James Cagney (The Public Enemy, 1931), and real-life figures like Joe Kennedy. The visual references are most obvious in the mise-en-scène and Nino’s repeated screenings of Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983). In what ways, then, does the film incorporate, and perhaps revise, the conventions of the American gangster film? And what is the role, if any, of Harlem in this cinematic rendering of the postindustrial American city? In creating its own version of the gangster film, New Jack City relies on two periods in gangster film history, the classic period and a revisionist moment from the late 1970s and early ’80s. Such a dual, and dueling, system of references provides the film with an ambiguous, somewhat schizophrenic, attitude toward the gangster. The film’s reliance on the classic gangster film is most evident, as suggested above, through dialogue, as if implying that a contemporary audience may not recognize the visual markers of the classic gangster film. Nino’s references, for example, to George Raft and James Cagney align his activities with the Prohibition era, when the illegal sale of alcohol boosted the fortunes of many small-time criminals and, in the case of Harlem, many African American neighborhoods, which often served as sites for illicit cabarets and speakeasies. The references to Raft and Cagney also align Nino’s activities with those of the

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classic gangster, a figure who inhabits the city “in order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.”45 Moreover, Nino connects the CMB’s activities to the criminal organizations of the 1920s and ’30s in his final court speech, which links the history of Prohibition to the urban crack epidemic. But Nino is no Joe Kennedy—a fact suggested by his ignorance of Kennedy’s legacy in an earlier scene—and like many gangsters, he’s doomed to fail. Nino is also connected to classic gangster figures through mise-en-scène. While early scenes show Nino in the track suits, Kangol hats, and the oversize gold jewelry of a small-time gang member (he is a former member of the “Lenox Avenue Boys,” a local street gang), his appearance and surroundings, like many rising gangsters, changes with his fortunes. An early montage sequence, for example, charts Nino’s rise with various scenes of gunplay, crack distribution, piles of cash being counted, and the corporatization (via computer systems) of the CMB enterprise. This latter element includes scenes in which Nino’s companions get haircuts and Nino himself is fitted for a suit, both actions suggesting their wish for a more conservative appearance (a component of most gangster films). The sequence is accompanied by an a capella version of “For the Love of Money/Living for the City,” as if suggesting that Nino’s professionalization involves abandoning his former hip hop lifestyle, including Queen Latifah’s musical stylings. Nino’s final transformation from gang member to the CEO of CMB comes with his acquisition of a grand living space, whose dark wood paneling, heavy curtains, plush furniture, and early-modern technology (a black dial phone sits on his bedside table) is more suggestive of the 1930s than the late ’80s. But in this film, unlike Jungle Fever, such interiors are not meant to reference the Du Boisian Talented Tenth. Instead, Nino’s surroundings and sartorial choices are more suggestive of the Prohibition-era criminal underworld. In other words, they are more signifiers of genre than they are of African American political or intellectual history. Despite appearances, New Jack City reminds us that Nino Brown is no oldschool gangster. For one thing, he lacks knowledge of classic figures like Joe Kennedy, who made their fortunes involved in illicit activities during the 1920s before moving into film and politics. More significant, however, is Nino’s identification with Al Pacino’s Tony Montana from Brian De Palma’s revisionist remake of Scarface, and scenes from the film appear twice. The first screening of Scarface occurs relatively early in the narrative. Following a violent New Year’s Eve altercation between Nino and a member of the Italian mob (representing the CMB’s partners), Nino and his companions return to his house to watch De Palma’s film. The scene opens with a long shot of Nino’s residence, then cuts to an image of Scarface, and a moment in the narrative when Tony is engaged in a fatal gunfight with a rival gang. Like Tony, Nino yells, “The world is mine!” As the scene (and Scarface) continues, Gee Money’s girlfriend, Uniqua (Tracy

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FIGURE 24. Nino’s (Wesley Snipes), “The world is mine!” in New Jack City (Warner

Bros., 1991).

Camilla Johns), attempts to seduce Nino by dancing in front of the screen, with the film’s final bloody gunfight projected onto her body. Uniqua’s behavior prompts an argument between Nino and his long-time girlfriend, Selina (Michael Michele). After Selina leaves the room, Nino repeats, “The world is mine,” before following her. The scene ends with Nino looking back in the screening room at Uniqua and Gee Money having sex, with Scarface replaced by Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song on the screen.46 While nothing of narrative importance occurs in the scene, it indicates a shift in Nino’s fortunes, one foreshadowed in the links it makes between Nino and Tony Montana (particularly a scene detailing Montana’s violent death). Scarface makes its second appearance near the end of New Jack City, once the CMB is destroyed by the combined forces of the Italian mob (with whom Nino has made a violent break) and the NYPD. Nino is in hiding at Uniqua’s apartment, watching Scarface on television (we don’t see the film; its presence is signified aurally). Shortly thereafter, Detective Scotty Appleton (Ice T) and Nick Peretti (Judd Nelson), attempt to arrest Nino, precipitating a gunfight. The scene ends with Nino on a pile of trash, having been thrown out of a tenement window by Appleton. While he survives the arrest, stands trial, and is ultimately acquitted of all charges, the film’s alignment of Nino with Tony Montana suggests that he will meet a fate similar to that of De Palma’s hero. This occurs following the trial, when a member of the community, angered by watching Nino’s acquittal, guns down the gangster. While the specifics of Nino’s death differ from Tony’s, a point to which I’ll return momentarily, his final appearance in the film echoes Tony’s demise. Shot from above, we see Nino’s body splayed out

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at the bottom of a spiral staircase, just as Tony’s dead body makes its last appearance, shot from above, splayed in a fountain in his house. Much has been written about De Palma’s Scarface and the changes the director and screenwriter made to Howard Hawks’s original, and even more has been written about the appeal of the remake for a generation of African American youth during the 1980s and ’90s. Todd Boyd, for example, argues that Scarface was responsible for rewriting the genre from “the perspective of race,” and summarizing “the aggressive accumulation of capital so typical of 1980s culture.” For Boyd, the film left an “impact” on contemporary society precisely because of the “iconic viability of the main character,” Tony Montana.47 Ken Tucker also argues for Scarface’s influence on African American popular culture, particularly gangsta rap and its attendant iconography. He discusses the different iterations of this iconicity in African American popular culture, from a Def Jam documentary (a special feature on the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary DVD special release), charting the “origins of a hip hop classic,” through the different appropriations of the film’s iconography and gangster mythos by rappers such as Scarface, Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, and 50cent (culminating in at least two appropriations of the Scarface poster, the cover for Scarface’s 2003 album, Balls and My Word, and Vibe’s April 2005 issue featuring 50cent as Scarface). The connections between the film and gangsta culture are made clearest perhaps by Russell Simmons, who claims that “Scarface was about empowerment at all costs [and so is] hip hop.”48 This is where New Jack City’s references to Scarface become most relevant: like the earlier film, New Jack City is highly self-conscious about the role of the government, the law, and crime in the community. In Scarface, the community was Miami’s Cuban population following the boatlift of spring 1980. In New Jack City, it is Harlem’s youth and the effects of Reaganomics, the war on drugs, and the growing crack epidemic. Such environmental determinism is not lost on Nino, who defends himself in court by claiming, “I was forced into this way of life. I’ve been dealing drugs since I was twelve years old. I didn’t have the chances that you have, Miss Hawkins. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, Miss Hawkins. I wanted to get out, but they threatened to kill my mother.” In a sardonic twist, the gangster uses discourses relating the city’s ill effects on African American youth to proclaim his lack of culpability over his actions. This is made all the more ironic by the fact that Nino directs his speech at an African American prosecutor who seems as helpless as Flipper in Jungle Fever to stem the invasion of drugs and violent behavior in the community. Indeed, Nino’s words recall the black bourgeoisie’s fears about urbanization and the masses, a message that is further supported by text that concludes the film: “Although this is a fictional story, there are Nino Browns in every major city in America. If we don’t confront the problem realistically—without empty slogans and promises—then drugs will continue to destroy our country.”

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In different ways and at different times the three films discussed in this chapter document the changes Harlem underwent between the 1970s and the ’90s. They relate a narrative of a cityspace that had become a dangerous dystopia in the 1970s and then, despite attempts at revitalization and restoration by the black middle class in the 1980s, became the victim of the equally devastating effects of crack cocaine and neoliberal economics. Black Caesar, Jungle Fever, and New Jack City also tell a tale of a changing film industry. Backed by Hollywood, African American film continued to produce its most familiar narrative, the crime film. Like earlier iterations of the gangster film in particular, these newer films adapted the formula for a specific context—Harlem in the late twentieth century—to explore African American identity and representation. The result was highly self-conscious stories of contemporary urban living. What we will see in the next chapter is how more recent photographic and cinematic iterations of Harlem take a nostalgic turn and construct an image of the neighborhood that resembles the Harlem of the 1920s and ’30s more than a Harlem of the present day.

5 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Echoes of a Renaissance Harlem’s Nostalgic Turn

Photography, like no other medium of visual communication, has sustained Harlem as a site of memory in the American, if not global psyche. —Cheryl Finley, “Harlem Sites of Memory”

In the epigraph above, art historian Cheryl Finley draws upon Pierre Nora’s concept of “site[s] of memory (les lieux des memoire)” to make sense of photography’s role in the construction of Harlem’s iconicity. In “Harlem Sites of Memory,” which appears in the Studio Museum’s catalogue for the 2003 Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor show, Finley provides a brief history of Harlem photography in order to argue that “Harlem’s understanding of itself” is enabled and sustained through the photographic medium. For Finley, photographic “images of the past activate sites of memory thorough an engagement with the temporal spatial aspects of lieux de memoire.”1 Finley appropriates only the surface elements of Nora’s concept, yet her reference to the spatial and temporal aspects of les lieux des memoire serves as an apt metaphor for a consideration of the visual constructions of Harlem—its myths, its realities—at the beginning of a new millennium. Finley is correct in looking to Nora’s discussion of memory and history, especially his assertion that certain sites—“spaces, gestures, images, and objects”—embody memory precisely because they contain a “sense of historical continuity.”2 And what is Harlem, if not a place with an overdetermined sense of historical continuity? This impression of history-in-the-making has been present from the neighborhood’s very beginning as an African American community, when new black residents, perhaps sold by Philip Payton’s marketing of the area, perceived that there was something different about Harlem. Finley’s essay, like the majority of the Harlemworld catalogue, focuses on photographic and architectural representations of Harlem, and yet Nora’s original discussion does not discount the effect of other media on the construction of sites of memory: “memory . . . relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. What began as 159

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writing ends as high fidelity and tape recording.” Nora continues, “the less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs.”3 These particular signs of Harlem include many of the visual and written products of the Renaissance years, an archive that has left an indelible mark on present-day considerations of the neighborhood.

Harlem Vibe: Revisioning VanDerZee This chapter opens with an image, a portrait of a man and a woman, draped in fur coats and standing in front of an automobile on a brownstone-lined street. The portrait, titled Couple in Raccoon Coats, is not the iconographic image by James VanDerZee from 1932, but rather its late-twentieth-century double, staged by photographer Barron Claiborne and used as the full-page frontispiece in Finley’s essay for the Harlemworld catalogue. The portrait was originally part of a series shot by Claiborne for a fashion spread, “Harlem Renaissance: Vintage Uptown Cool,” that appeared in the September 2002 issue of Vibe magazine.4 Intended to capture a particular place and time—Harlem 2002—the portrait resonates with many of the issues raised throughout Making a Promised Land. First, it relies on technology to make African American culture visible to itself and to a broader spectator/reader/consumer. Second, it does so by using Harlem’s ability to visually engender history and cultural memory through nostalgic iconography, while also suggesting the neighborhood’s continuing connections to African American progress. At one and the same time, therefore, the portrait signifies “Harlem 1932” and “Harlem 2002.” Certain ironies exist, however, under the surface of the VanDerZee/ Claiborne images. One the one hand, both portraits were taken by commercial photographers commissioned to sell a product. VanDerZee’s photograph, for example, presents a version of Harlem success: two affluent-looking Harlemites surrounded by luxurious fur and gleaming automotive technology. The idea being sold is one in which beautiful, successful people populate Harlem, the site of the African American dream. The latter image by Claiborne sells a similar idea, but its differences from the earlier version suggest some of the larger issues adhering to Harlem—and the idea of Harlem—in an early-twenty-firstcentury context defined increasingly by redevelopment, gentrification, and consumerism. The Claiborne portrait as it appears in Vibe also sells an idea of African American success and place through references to specific brands. While the models in the portrait are unnamed, their props are not: despite the title, the couple wear mink coats by Nija over outfits by Prada and Ralph Lauren Purple Label. Their hats are by Makine and the car is a 2003 SL500 roadster by Mercedes Benz (all products are identified in the credits, which constitute the

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FIGURE 25. Barron Claiborne, Couple in Raccoon Coats, from “Harlem Renaissance:

Vintage Uptown Cool,” in Vibe, September 2002. Courtesy of the artist.

majority of the spread’s text). Elsewhere in the feature, clothing by Yves Saint Laurent, Armani, Paul Smith, Gucci, and Helmut Lang, among others is modeled by young African American luminaries (though not necessarily Harlemites), including local historian Michael Henry Adams, author Brian Keith Jackson, singer Amerie, and actress Aunjanue Ellis. The feature appeared in a monthly magazine devoted to hip hop culture (music, fashion, film, television) and addressed to a young, affluent, and media-savvy reader who would have been

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familiar with (though perhaps unable to purchase) high-end consumer goods like Prada, Ralph Lauren, Armani, and Gucci. While the models may literally embody blackness (further underscored by Claiborne’s use of black-and-white film stock), multinational corporations manufacture and sell the merchandise they promote. In this context “Harlem” is marshaled to sell consumer goods neither produced in the area nor within the economic reach of most of the neighborhood’s residents (or the magazine’s readership), and the subjects are not so much from Harlem as they signify Harlem through a stylish blackness.5 A further irony can be found in the feature’s title, “Harlem Renaissance.” Obviously, the first reference is to VanDerZee, whose “iconic images of Harlem,” suggests Thelma Golden in the Harlemworld catalogue, “visualize and make sense of the incredible nostalgia for Harlem’s glorious past.”6 In this observation Golden suggests a temporal blurring that has been consistent in contemporary assessments of VanDerZee. He is the photographer most credited with recording Harlem’s heyday in the 1920s and ’30s, and yet he was virtually forgotten until the late 1960s, when a curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s controversial “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition brought his work to public attention, thereby elevating the photographer from small businessman (as most neighborhood photographers were during this time) to artist.7 His “iconic” images of the Harlem Renaissance years, therefore, did not become iconic until three decades after they were produced, at which time they were already memorializing a moment far removed from contemporary Harlem (and doing so in a context—the Metropolitan Museum—almost as physically removed). While VanDerZee is an overwhelming presence in Vibe’s “Harlem Renaissance” spread, his name does not appear in its introductory text. Other figures from the period are identified in writing, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and Duke Ellington. The citations of such cultural figures, along with the feature’s title and black-and-white film stock, set the tone for a piece that pays “homage to the spirit and the style of uptown life back in the day.”8 It is unclear, however, why Vibe’s editors chose this grouping of individuals beyond a desire to set the stage for photographs and text devoted to selling products. Harlem, the “spiritual and physical space for the soul of black culture”9 is thus transmogrified into a symbolic space for the sale of global consumer goods. A short time later, Claiborne’s Couple in Raccoon Coats appeared in Finley’s catalogue essay for Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor. The exhibition was intended to be an exploration of Harlem’s “present,” and a group of artists, architects, and scholars were invited to document the neighborhood and envision its future at a time when redevelopment was changing the contours of the area. Harlemworld included the work of eighteen architects and four photographers, three contemporary artists, and VanDerZee. (Claiborne is not a featured photographer, though Couple in Raccoon Coats appears in the catalogue).

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In addition to the visual pieces, the catalogue contains essays by Finley, Greg Tate, and Mabel O. Wilson, and introductions by the museum’s director (Lavery Stokes Sims) and the show’s curator (Thelma Golden). Unlike the visual work, which with the exception of VanDerZee, was produced by contemporary artists, the catalogue entries take a more historical approach to the subject and often limit their discussions of visual culture to photography. Any reference to moving images is absent, beyond those that were incorporated into the show’s architectural installations. The catalogue is strangely static, with little reference to or presentation of the polyphonic vitality of the neighborhood (a multimedia vitality that includes music, film, and video). The one exception to the focus on still images appears in Mabel O. Wilson’s “Black in Harlem: Architects, Racism and the City,” an essay that provides an overview of architectural interactions with the neighborhood, from Le Corbusier’s 1935 visit to a 1967 exhibition titled, “The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal,” commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art. Wilson critiques modern and postmodern architects for remaining “above” the neighborhood—approaching it theoretically rather than practically—thereby distancing themselves from the “real” environment of the city’s streets. As an alternative to the figure of the imperious architect, Wilson offers the fictional model of architect Flipper Purify from Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991). Flipper, she argues, is an example of a politically engaged Harlemite who is familiar with the area’s varied street culture. In other words, because Flipper lives in the community, he is in a better position to understand it culturally and therefore spatially (despite the fact that he works for a Midtown design firm and is never shown working locally). For Wilson, Lee’s film presents a “complex racialized tableaux of Harlem” by providing a street-level view of the area’s promise and pitfalls.10 I have already discussed the film at length earlier in this book, and, as I suggest, Jungle Fever has a complex relationship to both a historical and a present-day Harlem and uses the past as a means of exploring the roles and responsibilities of the black middle class. Wilson is correct in identifying the important role that Flipper plays in the film, but it extends far beyond simplified assertions of authenticity. Indeed, Flipper symbolizes the updated place of the black bourgeoisie in Harlem of the early 1990s. The cinema has been a central component, and front line, for defining African American identity, aesthetics, and citizenship since its beginnings as a scientific curiosity and sideshow attraction through its eventual acceptance as an art form. Film has played complex and often contradictory roles in defining Harlem as the black promised land, and filmmakers have, at various times, used the neighborhood as a symbol of African American modernity, despair, progress, and dismay (often within the same text). And yet, as the Harlemworld exhibit suggests, film continues to be treated as a secondary art in studies of African American visual culture, even though the cinema has constructed and

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projected images of Harlem throughout the century.11 In fact, film has been a central force in solidifying, via fleeting celluloid shadows (and, increasingly, digitized pixels), a form of history-in-the-making with regards to Harlem. Like the Harlemworld exhibit as a whole, this process is one of looking backward— nostalgically, historically—while also resolutely facing forward. How then do recent films set in Harlem turn to nostalgia in the process of communicating/ broadcasting/constructing contemporary African American identity? And what role does the gangster genre have in this process? The remainder of this chapter explores films set in or about (like gangster films from the 1930s, the two are not necessarily the same thing) historical Harlem. From Spike Lee’s sepia-toned Harlem in Malcolm X (1992) to Hoodlum’s (Bill Duke, 1997) backward glance at the neighborhood’s organized crime from the 1930s to American Gangster’s (Ridley Scott, 2007) references to the 1930s and ’70s, films from the past two decades have examined black America’s storied neighborhood through a variety of themes, including crime, economics, and personal and political transformation. While they vary in subject and time frame, they are connected by an overwhelming wistfulness—a sense of loss—for a Harlem of the past and a need, to quote Fredric Jameson on the history film, to “gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artefacts through once again.”12 Because recent reports have suggested that Harlem’s black population has been disappearing from the neighborhood—the result of gentrification and urban renewal that has pushed the area’s lower-income residents into the fringes of the city or elsewhere—such longing makes sense. But is this nostalgia also a symptom of a postmodern, postindustrial consumer society out of touch with the past? Finally, what sort of Harlem is being constructed for viewers by these films and how might it, unconsciously perhaps, support a new era of global consumerism and commodity fetishism of the type seen in Vibe’s “Harlem Renaissance: Vintage Uptown Cool” photo spread?

When Gangsters Were Heroes: The Return of the Harlem Gangster, Part 1 While contemporary Harlem was the setting for films like Jungle Fever, New Jack City, Juice (Ernest Dickerson, 1992), and Sugar Hill (Leon Ichaso, 1993) in the 1990s, historical Harlem began making an appearance, particularly in a number of biopics and gangster films, including Harlem Nights (Eddie Murphy, 1989), A Rage in Harlem (Bill Duke, 1991), Malcolm X, Hoodlum, and American Gangster.13 As I discussed in chapter 4, Harlem’s history was already being referenced in films with contemporary settings, which drew upon a whole host of iconography to explore present conditions in the neighborhood through a rubric refracting the political and social discourses of the past. The historical films—and here my

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focus will be on Malcolm X, Hoodlum, and American Gangster—take a slightly different approach to the area’s history by looking at the past through the lens of the present. All of films rely on generic conventions that by this time had become synonymous with filmic depictions of the area, especially those of the gangster film. Each, though in different ways, also borrows from the biopic, with their focus on actual historical personalities: Malcolm X, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, and Frank Lucas, respectively. Most important and unlike some of the films with contemporary settings, Harlem—or at least it symbolic resonances— plays a major thematic role in the historical films, thus returning us to the symbolic Harlem of Vibe. The Autobiography of Malcolm X devotes three chapters (and parts of at least one more) to Malcolm’s experiences in Harlem during the early 1940s. At this point in his life, Malcolm was still Malcolm Little, though he began to be known as “Detroit Red” during the years he spent in the neighborhood, first as a railroad worker, then as a waiter at Small’s Paradise before he turned to dealing drugs, hustling, running numbers, and, eventually, armed robbery. The narrative, recounted to Alex Haley in the early 1960s, captures Malcolm’s excitement upon arriving in what he described as “seventh heaven” two decades earlier.14 As a child in Lansing, Michigan, the young Malcolm had already heard about the neighborhood from his father, a proud race man who “described Harlem with pride, and showed us pictures of the huge parades by the Harlem followers of Marcus Garvey.” Malcolm continues, “Everything I’d ever heard about New York City was exciting—things like Broadway’s bright lights and the Savoy Ballroom and Apollo Theater in Harlem, where great bands played and famous songs and dance steps and Negro stars originated.”15 Malcolm, who was living in Roxbury, Massachusetts, at the time (1942), found employment with a railroad company, and before long he was working the line’s Boston-NYC run as a cook. His first experience of the city reads much like the migrant’s tales immortalized by writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Rudolph Fisher from decades before: “The cooks took me up to Harlem in a cab. White New York passed by like a movie set, then abruptly, when we left Central Park at the upper end, at 110th Street, the people’s complexion began to change.”16 In the beginning Malcolm visited the neighborhood during layovers, but it was not long before he left the railroad for a job as a day waiter at Small’s. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, with a screenplay by James Baldwin, Arnold Perl, and Lee, relies on the Autobiography to tell the transformative tale of Malcolm Little/Malcolm X/El Hajj Malik el-Shabazz from his youth through his assassination in 1965. The film’s genesis was troubled from its beginnings in 1968, when James Baldwin was commissioned to write the screenplay for Columbia Pictures. The project was shelved for many years before its original producer, Martin Worth, hired Norman Jewison to direct the project for Warner Bros.17 After Lee’s much-publicized vocal campaign against the selection of a white director to

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head the project, Jewison was replaced by the young director, who was just coming off of the release of Jungle Fever and who felt as though he was the best person for the job: “I knew it had to be done by an African-American director, and not just any African-American director either, but one to whom the life of Malcolm spoke very directly. And Malcolm has always been my man. I felt everything I’d done in life up to now had prepared me for this moment.”18 Lee reworked the Baldwin-Perl script, turning the story into a three-and-a-half hour historical epic that, despite its length, distilled much of the Autobiography into discrete events symbolizing certain key moments in Malcolm’s life.19 The film’s narrative is separated into three different periods: Malcolm’s youth and early years as a hustler in Boston and Harlem; his prison conversion and years with the Nation of Islam (NOI) as a disciple of the Honorable Elijah Muhammed; and the time between his break with the NOI, including his hajj to Mecca, and his assassination in 1965. While each section includes scenes in Harlem (covering a time span from the 1940s to the ’60s), I am most interested in the portion covering Malcolm’s early Harlem life, which is set during the early 1940s. This section takes up a relatively large amount of screen time, even though its content covers only a few years in Malcolm’s life (he went to Harlem in 1942 and was back in Boston in 1945, yet the section constitutes a third of the film’s 202 minutes). While the early-Harlem section of the film provides important information about Malcolm’s youth, its content and formal qualities tell us much more about Lee’s notions about the history of Harlem and, by extension, film history generally. As mentioned above, the Autobiography details Malcolm’s early life in Harlem. Upon first arriving in the city, young Malcolm knows that Harlem is home: “I was mesmerized. This world was where I belonged. On that night I had started on my way to becoming a Harlemite.”20 At this moment, Malcolm is recounting when he first entered Small’s Paradise and, taking in its confident and conservative black clientele (many of whom were, despite appearances, engaged in various criminal dealings), learned the difference between country life and city life: “I was awed. Within the first five minutes in Small’s, I had left Boston and Roxbury forever.”21 According to the Autobiography, Malcolm did not immediately start hustling. Instead, he worked for different railroad companies (losing or voluntarily leaving a number of jobs) before he took the job at Small’s. It was only after he made the mistake of giving an undercover military police officer a prostitute’s telephone number and lost his job that he became fully immersed in the neighborhood’s criminal underworld (the owners of Small’s, according to Malcolm, strictly forbade illegal activities in their establishment). In Malcolm X, Lee constructs a different version of Malcolm’s introduction to the neighborhood and its alternative economies. After a scene depicting Malcolm working in the kitchen of a train and listening to a Joe Louis fight, the film cuts to a sign for the 125th Street subway station before the camera pans to

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FIGURE 26. Malcolm Little/Malcolm X (Denzel Washington) on 125th Street in Malcolm X (Warner Bros. and 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1992).

a street filled with people celebrating Louis’s subsequent victory. Both events are fiction (in other words, Malcolm experiences neither in the Autobiography), but they set the tone for Malcolm’s cinematic introduction to a city filled with celebratory race pride.22 While Ella Fitzgerald’s “Drop Me Off in Harlem” plays on the soundtrack, Malcolm, dressed in a bright yellow-and-blue zoot suit, saunters down the street (while the camera tracks ahead of him), his smiling expression suggesting a passage from the Autobiography in which he reminisces, “In one night, New York—Harlem—had just about narcotized me.”23 For Malcolm, Harlem, the Promised Land, is the equivalent of a drug (and drugs are a stronger presence in the Autobiography than they are in the film). Following Malcolm’s walk down 125th Street the screen cuts to black. The next image is of Malcolm again, dressed in a different, though equally colorful suit, on the doorstep of Small’s Paradise. Once inside, the cinematic Malcolm experiences an entirely different space than the one described in the Autobiography. In the latter source, Malcolm visits Small’s repeatedly while still working on the railroads (so much so, he reminisces, that the “bartenders [in Small’s and the bar in the Hotel Braddock] began to pour a shot of bourbon, my favorite brand of it, when they saw me walk through the door”).24 After he becomes employed by the establishment, which occurs following two different railroad jobs, Malcolm enjoys positive relationships with the other employees and the clientele, who name him “Red” (which will be eventually amended to “Detroit Red” to differentiate him from other neighborhood Reds) and who provide him with an education that spans from the history of Harlem to being “schooled . . . by experts in such hustles as the numbers, pimping, con games of

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many kinds, peddling dope, and thievery of all sorts, including armed robbery.”25 One of Malcolm’s teachers was “a dark, businessman-looking West Indian,”26 who eventually replaces the young man’s zoot suits with more conservative attire. This relatively minor figure from the Autobiography will morph into the character of West Indian Archie, a major figure in Malcolm X. Malcolm’s introduction to Small’s in Lee’s film distills what actually takes pages of the Autobiography and months of Malcolm’s life to cover. In the film, Malcolm is almost immediately accosted by a bar patron after he mistakenly spills a drink on the man. The man looks at Malcolm’s suit and calls him a “country nigger” before insulting Malcolm’s mother. Malcolm responds by hitting him with a bottle and ordering a shot of bourbon. His behavior draws the attention of West Indian Archie (Delroy Lindo) and two companions who are sitting at a nearby table. They buy Malcolm a drink, which emboldens the young man to approach the table and introduce himself. After some bantering, Malcolm quits his railroad job, and begins to work for the Harlem numbers banker. During the interaction, West Indian Archie’s companions draw attention to Malcolm’s clothing and shoes, and the next scene begins with the gangster providing Malcolm with a new, more conservative suit. In the film, this begins a relationship with what has been described as one in a series of “perilous mentor[s]” who stood in for Malcolm’s deceased father over his lifetime.27 The fictional relationship also shares similarities with that between Curly and L. B. Lee in Dark Manhattan, suggesting generic connections that are further strengthened by the following montage sequence that provides a brief overview of the numbers racket via Malcolm’s experiences as a runner for Archie. Nell Irvin Painter has argued that each iteration of Malcolm’s life offers a “transubstantiation” of its subject’s biographical details.28 To be sure, each version of Malcolm’s narrative contains elements of fiction—from his Autobiography, which took the form of an oral narrative related to Alex Haley in 1964, to the original Baldwin-Perl screenplay (which resulted in a documentary, Malcolm X, in 1972), to other versions of the screenplay, to Lee’s final cinematic version—so to presume historical veracity is a foolish, if not impossible endeavor. This is even more the case if one considers that Lee’s film is not a documentary, a cinematic form with its own problematic truth claims, but rather a biopic, a docudrama, or some combination of the two. Therefore, my following consideration of the changes between the Autobiography’s presentation of West Indian Archie and Lee’s characterization is much more intent on identifying the ways in which the latter draws from the conventions of the gangster film to present Malcolm’s life as a numbers runner. West Indian Archie plays a minor role in the Autobiography, first appearing in a brief listing of Harlem “toughs” near the beginning of the second chapter, “Detroit Red,” devoted to Malcolm’s early life in the city. In his initial appearance, West Indian Archie is described as one of the “tough ones [who]

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had worked as strong-arm men for Dutch Schultz back when he muscled into the Harlem numbers industry after white gangsters had awakened to the fortunes being made in what they had previously considered ‘nigger pennies.’”29 By the time Malcolm meets West Indian Archie, Dutch Schultz is dead (assassinated by the Italians in 1935), and his former enforcer is known as a big gambler and numbers runner with a high-stakes clientele. West Indian Archie does not appear again until almost thirty pages (and another chapter) later when Malcolm, having lost his Small’s job and resorting to dealing drugs and committing robberies, gets involved in the numbers racket. He begins running numbers for a woman who worked for Dutch Schultz in the 1930s. At this time he also changed his personal numbers man (Malcolm played the numbers every week) to Archie, “one of Harlem’s really bad Negroes,” who was working for the same woman.30 The arrangement continued for an indeterminate amount of time until Malcolm claimed he won on a bet, which West Indian Archie initially paid, but he then accused Malcolm of lying. The disagreement led to a stand-off with guns before Malcolm fled Harlem, taking refuge in Boston. Shortly after this, he took part in the burglary that sent him to prison. The film offers a different version of Malcolm’s relationship with West Indian Archie. Whereas Archie is mostly part of the background in the Autobiography, he functions as mentor and father figure in the film, teaching Malcolm how to dress respectably, how to run numbers, how to commit bets to memory, and how to comport himself in such a way as to earn the neighborhood’s respect. There are many scenes of the two together, including one in which, high on drugs, the men mime a gunfight (foreshadowing their future tensions). Additionally, while the Autobiography stages the disagreement over the money as a “hustler-code impasse”31 that allows Malcolm to escape Harlem without either man shooting a gun, the film stages the conflict in classic gangster film fashion, with Archie leading Malcolm out of a nightclub (with Billie Holliday performing in the background) at gunpoint, and the younger man fleeing through a bathroom window. The scene immediately precedes a flashback from Malcolm’s youth in which the Klan burns down his family’s house and beats and murders his father. Such a connection ironically—and perhaps heavy-handedly—links Malcolm’s behavior with West Indian Archie to his father’s earlier heroism. That Lee staged the meeting and dissolution of Malcolm and West Indian Archie’s relationship in such a manner should come as no surprise, as this portion of the film draws heavily on elements of the gangster film; the director suggests that Malcolm X’s appearance was based on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972).32 And while Anna Everett argues that visual elements of the gangster film and the film noir can be observed throughout Malcolm X, I believe that they are most evident in these early scenes of Malcolm’s criminal life (the gangster life befitting the conventions). For example, when Malcolm

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first enters Small’s, the space is filmed in dark browns, reds, and blacks, with high-key lighting illuminating the faces of characters. Malcolm’s costume, a red zoot suit with black pinstripes, glows in the light, the color suggesting not only Malcolm’s future name, but also the danger of the situation. The mise-enscène’s overall tone denotes mystery and danger. The scene is followed by a generic montage sequence detailing Malcolm’s rise in the numbers racket and in West Indian Archie’s organization, thus linking his first meeting with the older gangster to his early life of crime. Even more important than the visual design, however, are the section’s thematic similarities with The Godfather in particular and the gangster film more generally. Everett makes the connection between both films’ focus on masculinity by suggesting that Malcolm X’s “dark chiaroscuro lighting conventions of film noir . . . renders visually the uncertainty, the untrustworthiness and suspect motives behind Malcolm Little’s . . . close male relationships.”33 Indeed, much of the gangster film mythos has been built around the uncertainty of male relationships and the homosocial world they construct. This is particularly the case between the young gangster protégé and his older gangster mentor, a relationship as common to the genre as the use of guns, street vernacular, and violence and seen as early as Little Caesar (Mervyn Leroy, 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932). In such a scenario, a young, perhaps too-ambitious gangster rises up through the ranks of organized crime, eventually—and often violently—succeeding his mentor as leader of the organization—a scenario that I have discussed thus far with regard to Dark Manhattan, Black Caesar, and even The Cool World. The Godfather changed the formula by focusing on father-son dynamics in a large family dynasty (during a time period very close to the early scenes of Malcolm X). Both Coppola’s and Lee’s films share certain themes, particularly that of masculine transformation. In the former film, for example, Michael Corleone changes from a law-abiding World War II veteran to a younger version of his father. In the latter film, Malcolm experiences multiple transformations, often linked to his relationships with father figures.34 While it comes as no surprise that a director as film literate as Lee would draw from cinematic history (and an earlier, much discussed scene functions as his chilling rejoinder to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation [1915]), he is not alone in making connections to Hollywood. In fact, in some ways he takes his cues from Malcolm himself, who links this period in his life with his discovery of the cinema: “It was at this time that I discovered the movies. Sometimes as many as five in one day, both downtown and in Harlem. I loved the tough guys, the action. Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, and I loved all of that dancing and carrying on in such films as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky. After leaving the movies, I’d make my connections for supplies, then roll my sticks, and, about dark, I’d start my rounds.”35 At least at this point in his life, Malcolm had a love for Hollywood genres, particularly gangster films and musicals, and Lee

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includes homages to both in Malcolm X. Malcolm’s (and Lee’s) appreciation for musicals, for example, is illustrated in an early dance scene in the Roseland Ballroom, which borrows the grand mise-en-scène (stage, band, multiple dancers), music, and choreography from early musicals.36 Malcolm’s interest in cinematic tough guys also appears in an early scene in which he and Shorty act out different gangster characters in a Boston park, with Malcolm playing Humphrey Bogart and Shorty as James Cagney.37 The combination of these scenes with others focusing on Malcolm’s relationship with West Indian Archie exhibit “the specific aesthetic influences informing Lee’s auteur vision, including a penchant for the hyperbolic drama and fast-paced action of the classic Warner Bros. crime dramas of the 1930s.”38 Malcolm X, much like The Godfather, is as much a gangster film as it is a historical epic. But what of Harlem in these early scenes? Much of the content appears as if it were shot on a set, from Malcolm’s first walk down 125th Street to his later (and multiple) entries into Small’s Paradise. There are, in fact, very few location shots in this portion of the film, and most of the scenes (like Jungle Fever before it) are interiors, including Small’s, Archie’s well-appointed apartment, and another club. The first time we see Malcolm in Harlem illustrates this point: Malcolm leaves the 125th Street train station and walks down a street filled with Harlemites celebrating Joe Louis’s recent victory. The crowd scenes are shot from above with very tight framing. Such composition not only communicates the sheer humanity of the neighborhood—people are packed into the frame as they are on the sidewalks—it also disallows spectators from discerning the background, which is shaded in black. The only shots of actual streets appear in newsreel footage of Joe Louis in Harlem intercut with the crowd scenes, which provides the film with some historical veracity.39 Similarly, a shot of Malcolm standing in front of the Apollo’s box office is equally as selfconscious, with the only indication of location coming from a sign on the window in the background rather than from a more familiar (and by now iconic) street shot. To be fair, the early scenes’ focus on a certain moment in Malcolm’s and Harlem’s history may have called for a stylization that was impossible to capture through location shooting in the early 1990s, a feat that seemed easier to accomplish in later scenes set during Malcolm’s life in the city during the 1950s and ’60s (which have far more exterior shots than the earlier sections of the film). And, as Lee suggests in By Any Means Necessary, limited budgets disallowed some choices of locations.40 Yet, the director’s decision to expand Malcolm’s relationship with West Indian Archie and to focus on Malcolm’s involvement in the numbers racket suggests an overall indebtedness to Hollywood form and style that undermines Lee’s desire to present a truthful rendering of Malcolm’s life. Furthermore, such stylization suggests that Malcolm X should be “viewed as an artifact of this time [1992] rather than of the 1960s,”

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when the Autobiography was narrated, or of the early 1940s, the setting for the early scenes.41 Indeed, the film, like the “Harlem Renaissance” spread in Vibe, says more about the time in which it was made than when it was set. And here one must stress that the film was released at almost the same time that films with contemporary settings, such as New Jack City were mapping a different sort of Harlem than what is presented in Malcolm X. For Everett, the film “depicted some striking similarities to these films in its presentation of Malcolm Little’s early years as Detroit Red,” but, she continues, “it presented striking alternatives as well,” including a diversity of black male characters ranging from Malcolm’s father to the “various masculinities of Malcolm X himself.”42 But I would like to refocus Everett’s identification of these alternatives away from masculinity (because surely the argument can be made that the gangsta films from the early 1990s were about nothing if not about black masculinity) and toward the urbanscape. Like Jungle Fever, and unlike many of the hood films of the time, Malcolm X presents a complicated cityspace that is not only filled with crime, drugs, and prostitution, but one that continues to have a transformative potential. Malcolm Little arrived in Harlem as a hustler, drug dealer, and numbers runner, left as a fugitive from underworld justice, and returned as a community leader and visionary. The film’s presentation of Harlem may be nostalgic and rely on Hollywood conventions from another era, but such aesthetics have a purpose: to remind viewers of the area’s importance in the creation and maintenance of African American political and social culture. Indeed, in Harlem, gangsters could become leaders.

When Gangsters Were Heroes: The Return of the Harlem Gangster, Part 2 Bill Duke’s Hoodlum returns to the Harlem numbers racket of the early 1930s, a subject and time period similar to that explored in earlier black gangster films like Dark Manhattan and a slightly earlier moment than that celebrated in Malcolm X. Hoodlum opens with rolling text that establishes place and time, “Harlem 1934.” It continues by introducing basic plot points and major characters, including “Madame Queen,” the “undisputed leader of the Harlem numbers,” gangsters Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano, and Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. The narrative, based on actual events and people, details the attempts by white organized crime, particularly Dutch Schultz, to take over the numbers in Harlem. Schultz (born Arthur Fleigenheimer) was a Jewish gangster who made most of his money running bootlegging, gambling, and extortion enterprises during the 1920s. Although the Italian crime bosses with whom he was aligned showed little interest in Harlem, Schultz believed that there was money to be made

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“uptown” (really downtown, as he was based in the Bronx). He began moving into the area in the early 1930s, taking over one African American numbers banker after another through a combination of violence, extortion, and powerful connections in the police and local government.43 Schultz was successful because Harlem’s black bankers lacked his organization’s size, influence, and ability to wreak violence on any resisters. Moreover, he had the backing of key crime kings like Luciano, Owney Madden, Frank Costello, and Bugsy Siegel, whom he could call on if necessary. By 1932, Schultz controlled most of the numbers activity in Harlem, literally draining “the profits out of the community” by employing whites and reducing the number of black workers employed by the operations.44 He remained in control of the area until 1935, when he was killed in a mob-ordered hit. Schultz plays a major role in Hoodlum, but the film’s main focus is Bumpy Johnson (Laurence Fishburne) and Madame Queenie (Cicely Tyson), a character based on Stephanie St. Clair, a West Indian numbers queen who had a reputation for fighting corrupt politicians and police, and who resisted Schultz’s attempts at taking her business. Early in the film, Johnson, fresh out of Sing Sing, meets Queenie and quickly becomes her enforcer, protector, and confidant. The film’s early scenes detail the pair’s resistance to Schultz’s (Tim Roth) attempts to take over Queenie’s business. It’s not long, however, before the numbers queen is arrested and Hoodlum’s focus shifts to Johnson’s management of her interests, his ongoing war with Schultz, and his eventual rise through the ranks of Harlem’s organized crime. There are a number of subplots that attempt to humanize Johnson—one concerning his cousin Illinois (Chi McBride) and another involving a romance with a Christian woman named Francine (Vanessa Williams)—but in the end Hoodlum follows basic generic norms, narrating the rise and fall of the gangster. Because the film also revises some conventions, however, Johnson’s fall is only partial; he not only survives but is somewhat redeemed by the end of Hoodlum, even as he continues his criminal enterprises.45 The remainder of this discussion will focus on two changes that the film makes to the gangster genre, the characterization of the gangster figure and the presentation of place. Hoodlum presents Johnson as a Casper Holstein–like race man, a figure who provides the Depression-struck Harlemites with cash and who articulates discourses of empowerment and self-determination. Two moments from the film serve as examples of this aspect of Johnson’s character: first, in a scene appearing about halfway through the film, Johnson and Illinois steal a truckload of collection money from one of Schultz’s men in retaliation for the gangster’s attempts to take Queenie’s territory. Rather than adding it to Queenie’s banks or using the cash for personal gain, the pair stop at a soup line run by Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association and literally shower the destitute and hungry Harlemites with bills and coins.46 The scene not only demonstrates

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Johnson’s sympathy for his neighbors, it also elucidates his suggestion of the productive links between crime and the community by graphically illustrating the positive effects of the numbers on the economics of the neighborhood (if, of course, the profits remain in Harlem). In another scene, Francine asks Johnson why it is that he “has to” run numbers. His response, “I’m a colored man. White folks ain’t left me nothing but the underworld,” adds a specific racial dimension to Robert Warshow’s assertion about the gangster more generally: “when we come upon him, he has already made his choice or the choice has already been made for him . . . we are not permitted to ask whether at some point he could have chosen to be something else than what he is.”47 Unlike the white gangsters to which Warshow refers, we are permitted to consider Johnson’s alternatives in Hoodlum even if he won’t or can’t. The film opens with Johnson in prison, where the warden comments on his prisoner’s exceptionalism: “You’re different from the other coloreds in here. You read books, play chess, write poetry.” Having established Johnson’s talents in the first scene (and notably through the rubric of white authority), the film builds on the warden’s initial observations; for example, at various points in the narrative Johnson plays chess, attends the opera with Queenie, surrounds himself with books, or, in the previously discussed scene with Francine, recites his own poetry.48 Johnson is no mere street criminal. Intelligent, talented, and refined, he is modeled specifically after Du Bois’s Talented Tenth. He is the hero of the film, despite the presence of other characters like Queenie and Schultz. In fact, it is Johnson, much more than Schultz, who fits Lucky Luciano’s preferred behavior for his criminal partners, and thus it is no surprise when the two men join forces to eliminate Schultz. The film draws many of Johnson’s characteristics from the actual gangster’s legend. By all accounts, Johnson was educated, having briefly attended City College in Harlem to study law before choosing a life of crime. Bumpy, according to Ron Chepesiuk, “had a good knowledge of Black history, read William Shakespeare, listened to Ludwig van Beethoven, and reportedly was an aboveaverage chess player.” He also wrote poetry, some of which was published in Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Negro Freedom Movement in the 1960s. Moreover, Johnson was a proud race man with a well-honed understanding of the neighborhood’s material conditions and his position within that economic structure. He, like a number of other African American numbers bankers (such as Holstein), was known for providing Harlem residents with jobs and for his annual Christmas parties (an example of which is included in Hoodlum), during which he distributed gifts to the neighborhood’s children. His charitable endeavors, which included donating to African American causes, earned him the moniker of “the Robin Hood of Harlem.”49 Like Queenie, part of Johnson’s resistance to Schultz’s attempted takeover was based on his desire to keep the money and the jobs it brought in the community.

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But Johnson was also a “ruthless gangster who pimped, ran the numbers, pushed heroin, and extorted from people in the community,”50 activities that get less coverage in the film. Hoodlum shows the gangster engaged in acts of violence, but these moments are rare and tend to be justified responses to Schultz’s attempts to gain control of Queenie’s business. For the first half of the film, for example, Johnson is rarely involved in bloodshed; rather he is either protecting Queenie or romancing Francine. Even after Queenie and Johnson are brutally ambushed on the way to the opera (in a scene referencing a similar moment in The Godfather) and the resulting violence leaves a number of men dead, Johnson retaliates only by stealing Schultz’s money and giving it away, thus turning a personal negative into a community positive. It is only after Schultz engineers Queenie’s arrest, attempts to have Bumpy murdered, and begins an all-out onslaught on Queenie’s business that things begin to change. Notably, this transition is marked by a montage sequence that borrows heavily from gangster films of the 1930s: calendar pages are intercut with gunplay (during which Schultz is presented as the aggressor), newspaper headlines provide information about the gang war, shots of money, and images detailing Johnson and Francine’s developing relationship. He becomes more violent after the montage, the technique establishing his connection to a larger gangster legacy. This change is not without consequences, as his increased criminality damages his relationships with Queenie, Francine, and Illinois. Beyond presenting Johnson as a fair-minded man who eschewed violence unless provoked, Hoodlum also presents his war against Schultz as one of racial empowerment rather than a move motivated by greed. This is articulated most clearly through Johnson’s insistence that the numbers in Harlem remain blackcontrolled and that he (and by extension, Queenie) remain independent of white organized crime. And, as imputed earlier, to a certain extent, this was true. Yet, despite Hoodlum’s suggestion to the contrary, Johnson was never an independent operator in Harlem. He worked for St. Clair briefly and at the time when she capitulated to Schultz’s pressure. Then in 1935, the same time period covered by the film (and the year of Schultz’s death), Bumpy struck a deal with the Italians and served as the mob’s middleman and enforcer—its black face— until the 1950s (if not later).51 “The Mob needed somebody with the respect and resources to handle their business in Harlem and to collect the money,” argues Lew Rice, a former agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency. “Bumpy was the Mob’s man.”52 He was the Italian’s enforcer, the “contact man” in Harlem who “handled the disciplinary action with the rackets’ families.”53 Indeed, Johnson may have been a race man, but he was neither the reluctant gangster nor the independent trailblazer presented by Hoodlum. A brief comparison with another cinematic iteration of Bumpy Johnson may suggest the liberties taken by Hoodlum’s writer and director and help us understand why such changes may have been made in this film at this particular

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moment in time. While the black gangster films from the 1930s never made specific reference to actual gangsters—though, as I’ve argued, Dark Manhattan’s L. B. Lee may have been inspired by Casper Holstein—blaxploitation films did. In fact, Johnson made his first cinematic appearance in Gordon Parks Sr.’s Shaft in 1971. Parks’s film depicts Johnson negatively; as someone who has terrorized the neighborhood with his violence and destroyed its citizens with his drug dealing. In Shaft, Johnson is a symbol of Harlem’s decline, a figure that feeds off his own community while returning nothing (much like Tommy Gibbs in Black Caesar). The reasons for such a depiction may be related to two historical factors. First, Johnson died in 1968, only a few years before Shaft was released, and his Mafia connections and drug dealing (he died while on probation for a drug charge) still may have been recent enough to warrant criticism, especially in a film directed by a widely recognized civil rights advocate. Second, blaxploitation films were almost always set in the immediate moment rather than the past. As such, Shaft is focused on present-day Harlem at a time when drugs and crime were destroying the community. In such a narrative, Bumpy is the cause of the neighborhood’s problems, not its solution. Hoodlum’s narrative, on the other hand, is focused on Johnson’s involvement in the numbers rackets during the 1930s, not his later activities with drugs. The film is a period piece that utilizes sepia tones and a jazz- and bluesinfused soundtrack to create the look and sound of a simpler time, one that existed before drugs replaced the numbers racket and when black gangsters considered the best interests of the neighborhood. In this scenario, Johnson becomes an African American hero, fighting the racism embodied in Dutch Schultz and his organization (including corrupt Tammany Hall politicians and crooked Irish cops). But why such a return to what amounts to a classic portrayal of the gangster, especially in light of the growing popularity of “gangsta” alternatives presented by films like New Jack City, Juice, and other films? The answer, I believe, is related to location, particularly the cityspace of Harlem in the late twentieth century. There is no doubt that Hoodlum’s mise-en-scène contributes to the sense of nostalgia that is already apparent in the film’s focus on Johnson. Its production design adroitly obtains period detail in its attempt to capture the look and feel of a certain time and place. Great attention is placed on costuming and interior design, with the result that settings such as the Cotton Club and other cabaret spaces are reminiscent of scenes from a Palmer Hayden or Archibald Motley painting and Bumpy resembles a figure in a VanDerZee (or Claiborne) portrait. Choosing exterior locations proved to be a more difficult task for the production team, which had to look outside of Harlem for appropriate places to shoot. According to the production notes, “Although Hoodlum is set in New York, it was actually filmed in Chicago since sections of The Windy City so closely resemble 1930’s Harlem. Computer-generated imagery completed the effect by obscuring

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modern buildings and placing New York Landmarks . . . in many of the shots.”54 This was not the first time that director Bill Duke chose another location to stand in for Harlem: his A Rage in Harlem, an adaptation of Chester Himes’s For Love of Immabelle (1966), was shot in Cincinnati’s “Over-the-Rhine” district. According to Duke, contemporary Harlem did not resemble its 1950s iteration. Similarly, with Hoodlum Duke felt it was necessary to go elsewhere to achieve a believable “Harlem look.” The result is that the film’s exteriors have a highly stylized artificiality. Streets are eerily empty of people and spotlessly clean. There is no sense of a living city; instead, Harlem looks like a computer-generated monument to the idea of the Black Metropolis. There is an ultimate irony in Duke’s claim that Chicago’s South Side resembled 1930s Harlem more than the actual neighborhood, particularly given that the area is the centerpiece for a narrative focused on the attempts by whites to control the symbolic center of black identity. Such a narrative is not new, and Making a Promised Land has suggested that property ownership and race tensions have been intertwined since the beginnings of black Harlem’s establishment in the early twentieth century. At the time when Hoodlum was released, Harlem was in the midst of a massive transition that had started in the 1980s, as middle-class professionals (black and white) began moving into the area, but that was greatly enabled by the establishment of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ) in 1994, which was instrumental in fostering development in Harlem, particularly along the 125th Street corridor. This “Second Renaissance,” as it has been called, had sparked fears that the neighborhood was being gentrified to the point at which blacks were being pushed out. In such a scenario, then, Harlem’s historic past has been used as a marketing tool for young gentrifiers looking to move into a conveniently located neighborhood. Ultimately, it is no surprise that Hoodlum makes a hero of Bumpy Johnson, an old-school gangster with roots in the community, because no matter his crimes, Harlem always came first.

When Gangsters Were Heroes: The Return of the Harlem Gangster, Part 3 In the opening scene of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, crime boss Bumpy Johnson (Clarence Williams III) leads his driver and protégé, Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), to a newly opened electronics store on 125th Street. The year is 1968. The elder gangster uses the occasion to lament the changes in the community that he believes have resulted in the attenuation of the area’s character. Shortly after his condemnation of chain stores and franchises like the one in which he sits, Johnson collapses and dies of a heart attack. While American Gangster is a story about Frank Lucas’s rise and fall, not Bumpy Johnson, this opening moment gestures back to the past while also referencing the film’s

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FIGURE 27. Bumpy Johnson (Clarence Williams III) and Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) in American Gangster (Universal Pictures, 2007).

immediate context. The film’s sympathetic rendering of the elderly Johnson suggests that Harlem gangsters of earlier generations—like Johnson and Casper Holstein, for example—were race men who supported their community (and an earlier very brief glimpse of Johnson handing out turkeys to needy Harlemites supports this position). Yet, the scene’s apocryphal anti-big-box message is more akin to twentieth-first-century laments about gentrification than it is about Johnson, Lucas, or even Harlem for that matter (the film, it should be noted, is only partially set in the neighborhood). This seeming schizophrenia makes American Gangster—and its multiple temporal personalities—an appropriate text with which to conclude this discussion of Harlem, African American visual culture, and nostalgia, because the film remains resolutely historical and contemporary at the same time. Despite its opening scenes focusing on Johnson and Lucas, American Gangster is only partly a gangster film and only partially set in Harlem. The film was based on an article titled “The Return of Superfly,” by Mark Jacobson (who received writing credit on the film), and published in New York magazine in August 2000. The article is a profile of Lucas, written nine years after his release from prison, and nearly thirty years after his reign as one of “the biggest heroin dealers in Harlem” ended when he was indicted—the first time—on drug charges.55 When Lucas came to Harlem in the mid-1940s, he met Johnson and worked for the elder gangster in some capacity (as driver, bodyguard, or enforcer) until the latter’s death in 1968.56 By the early 1970s, Lucas was a neighborhood legend best known for breaking the grip of the Italian mob on Harlem’s heroin business by working with sources in Southeast Asia and shipping the drugs to the United States on military transports.

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Unlike the New York magazine article, which builds its story through Lucas’s reminiscences of various Harlem places and people, the film interweaves the narrative of the gangster’s rise and fall with the somewhat fictionalized story of Ritchie Roberts (Russell Crowe), the real-life New Jersey–based narcotics agent responsible for Lucas’s downfall, along with the arrest and convictions a number of corrupt NYPD officers. Aside from the first few scenes, which establish Lucas’s relationship with Johnson and his eventual annexation of the latter’s territory, the narrative is almost evenly split between gangsters and police, following a similar pattern as we saw in New Jack City, whose gangster/gangsta narrative appealed to a young audience, but whose focus on law and order provided a moral compass similar to that of classical gangster films from the 1930s. Unlike the former film, however, which is skewed toward the criminal figures in focus, American Gangster presents both Lucas and Roberts as fully developed characters with ties to their communities, North Carolina and Harlem in the case of the former, and New Jersey in the case of the latter. The film, therefore, can be considered a more general crime film than as a straightforward gangster film, despite the initial appearance of Johnson, the narrative arc of Lucas’s career, or its title. While American Gangster begins with a title announcing that it is based on a true story, the filmmakers—director Ridley Scott and writer Stephen Zaillian— took liberties with the narrative, and their expansions on history are revealing about film genre and, more important, the figure of the black gangster in film.57 Scott, a recognizable Hollywood name for decades, has made films covering a gambit of genres, from science fiction to the war film. He is known for big, expensive films that attract stars like Washington, Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, and other A-list celebrities (mostly male and mostly white). He is, however, not associated with African American subject matter, and this, along with his tendency to make films with big budgets and high-profile stars, may account for the expansion of the narrative to include Roberts (who was not mentioned in the Jacobson piece). Unlike previous black gangster films, which were made either independently or through Hollywood on limited budgets, American Gangster, with a budget of $100 million, was designed to reach as many spectators as possible.58 It is no surprise, therefore, that the narrative incorporated the story of a white police officer; it provided wider appeal and the possibility of more star power with the casting of Russell Crowe (a Scott regular) as Lieutenant Ritchie Roberts. Yet and still, American Gangster follows many of the conventions of the black gangster film in its presentation of Frank Lucas.59 The plot starts at the beginning of Lucas’s rise to become the leading heroin dealer in Harlem (more than twenty years after the younger man arrived in Harlem and began his association with Johnson). The film presents Lucas as Johnson’s committed student, down to his understated business attire, his generosity toward the

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community (a scene of Lucas handing out Thanksgiving turkeys mirrors an earlier shot of Johnson doing the same), and his violent retribution toward rivals. In fact, American Gangster makes Lucas out to be a Robin Hood of sorts, an association often made to Johnson and Casper Holstein before him but which was never really used to describe the real-life Lucas. As played by Denzel Washington, Lucas is a confident and savvy entrepreneur, with a commanding presence and a great desire to be his own man. Unlike Johnson, who had a lifelong working relationship with the Italians who ran the neighborhood, the cinematic Lucas decides to go directly to Southeast Asia for his drug supply, thereby cutting out the middlemen. According to the young entrepreneur, “Nobody owns me. Because I own my own company.” Like Hoodlum’s approach to Johnson, American Gangster rewrites Lucas’s legacy from violent gangster, drug dealer, and informant to that of a race man. But the treatment of Lucas’s business practices injects an element of schizophrenia, previously mentioned, into the film because it combines a historical version of the black bourgeoisie’s focus on black enterprise with more contemporary observations on greed and globalization—the latter being the very same economic model affecting Harlem at the time the film was made. In Jacobson’s article, for example, Lucas outlines the main difference between Bumpy and himself: whereas the older man was a “gentlemen among gentlemen, a king among kings, a killer among killers, a whole book and Bible by himself,” the younger man “wasn’t gonna be no next Bumpy. Bumpy believed in that sharethe-wealth. I was a different sonofabitch. I wanted all the money for myself.”60 Such an attitude differs greatly from earlier Harlem gangsters. It is, however, one of the defining mindsets of American capitalism in the twenty-first century. The film presents the fictional Lucas differently from this cutthroat model. Indeed, his business savvy and overall demeanor recall gangsters in films from the 1930s, in which criminal activities were organized much along the lines of a legitimate business; and here, L. B. Lee’s numbers bank in Dark Manhattan from 1937 provides a good example. Located in a nicely appointed office run by a welldressed and educated staff, Lee’s bank presented a proper and plausible business front for his illegal operations. It was a black-owned business that gave back to the community by offering employment and the limited, but real, chance for economic gain through the numbers. On the face of it at least, Lucas’s operation is similarly organized, though rather than relying on Harlemites for support, Lucas employed his brothers in the most sensitive areas of the business, importing them from his North Carolina home. As he explains when his family first arrives, “What matters in business is honesty, integrity, hard work, loyalty, and never forgetting where you came from.” Additionally, Lucas constructs a complex supply network in Southeast Asia in order to not only procure pure heroin, but to transport it back to the United States.61 The complexity of the organization is illustrated through a montage sequence

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detailing the movement of the morphine base from Southeast Asia to American military planes, where it is transported to military bases on the East Coast and then, finally, to New York. In both areas of his business, staff and raw materials, Lucas looks outside Harlem, a point that is much more significant than it may first appear, because his actions not only flood the neighborhood with drugs, but they also drain it of income, much like Dutch Schultz and the Italians in previous decades. For Lucas, Harlem seems nothing more than an amicable place to locate his business. Lucas resembles an old-school gangster (an effect heightened by Washington’s performance, which in appearance and behavior resembles that of Malcolm X more than Frank “Superfly” Lucas) in his conservative business attire and understated demeanor. Such an unassuming disposition is stressed as a strategy for avoiding the authorities several times in the narrative. In one scene, for example, Lucas criticizes his brother Huey (Chiwetel Ejiofor) for dressing in a “clown suit”—a brightly colored jacket, hat, and wide-collared shirt that says, according to Lucas, “arrest me.” For Lucas, his brother’s sartorial choices align him with his rival, Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a notorious Harlem drug dealer known for his resplendent outfits, extravagant lifestyle, and braggadocio. Lucas tells his brother that if he “wants to be Superfly” he can work for Barnes, but if he wants to work for the family he has to learn how to fade into the background. After this scene, Lucas takes his brother shopping for more appropriate attire, but the subject arises again when, against his best judgment, Lucas wears an extravagant chinchilla hat and coat to a packed Muhammad Ali/Joe Frazier boxing match at Madison Square Garden.62 The outfit is a gift from his fiancée Eva (Lymari Nadal), and it makes the gangster conspicuous enough among the fans gathered at the event (even though others wear similar outfits) to draw the attention of both Ritchie Roberts and Detective Trupo (Josh Brolin), the head of the NYPD’s corrupt Special Forces Unit. Soon after, Trupo starts extorting Lucas for protection money, and the film suggests that the gangster’s outfit—not his criminal activities—led to the beginning of the end for Lucas. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Lucas’s nickname was “Superfly,” a moniker he earned for his theatrical appearance and extravagant lifestyle. Ron Chepesiuk argues that as “Super Fly, Lucas looked and acted the part. He wore custom-made suits, sable coats, and plenty of jewelry and drove a fleet of luxury wheels.”63 Jacobson concurs, and suggests that at the height of his success, Lucas “thought nothing of spending $50,000 on a chinchilla coat and $10,000 on a matching hat” and “possessed 100 custom-made suits, multi-hued suits.” Lucas, along with Harlem’s other drug kingpins, Nicky Barnes and Frank Matthews, was a highly visible presence during the early 1970s, when he associated with the boxer Joe Louis and other celebrities at places like Small’s.

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FIGURE 28. Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) photographed as Superfly in American Gangster (Universal Pictures, 2007).

Barnes and Matthews were similarly flamboyant; for example, Matthews, or “Black Caesar,” was known for his “sable mink coat and leather safari suits” and he lived in a “white-pillared, marble-floored mansion” in Staten Island much to the ire of his neighbors—including Italian crime bosses.64 Barnes, as suggested, was also widely known for his taste in designer clothes and Gucci glasses, even before his nickname of “Mr. Untouchable” became recognized outside of Harlem after he appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 1977.65 The point is not that the film distorts the truth, but that it presents Lucas as if he were a Bumpy-like figure when he had much more in common with—and was a model for—a newer generation of Harlem drug dealers/gangsters. None of these men were particularly race men; instead, their main goal was the accrual of wealth and the conspicuous consumption of clothing, cars, and women.66 Undoubtedly, such nostalgic treatment of a figure like Lucas has the effect of reducing their role in the demise of the neighborhood. Despite the split in screen time between Lucas and Roberts, the film follows the narrative arc of a gangster story: Lucas rises to the top, begins to make mistakes, and is finally caught. There are, however, some deviations from this pattern, and they are suggestive of the ways in which this African American gangster story differs from its predecessors, just as Lucas “was no Bumpy.” First, Lucas’s criminality is motivated by greed, ego, and a desire to support his extended family. Once they arrive in the city, Lucas employs his brothers and cousins even though none appear to be as driven or as street savvy as he is (they are, after all, new migrants to the big city, whereas Lucas had two decades of Harlem experience on which to draw). He buys his mother a suburban estate, which becomes the center of family gatherings. This focus on family, while

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admirable in the general narrative, also hastens Lucas’s downfall—even more than his greed, violence, or fashion faux pas—because, rather than suggest his humanity, it instead indicates a weakness of character. First, the police don’t notice Lucas until the Ali/Frazier fight, when he agrees, against his better judgment, to wear the coat and hat given to him by Eva. Lucas discovers his mistake on the couple’s wedding night, when they are pulled over and threatened by Trupo after leaving the church. His other family connections prove just as weak—for example, his brother’s driver records his activities for Roberts, leading to the gangster’s arrest and indictment, and the eventual arrest of all the Lucas brothers. Nonetheless, Lucas is neither sympathetic nor a victim. Instead of concluding with the gangster’s imprisonment or death (the most common ending for a classic gangster film) or with his escape (a more standard conclusion of newer gangster films), Lucas becomes a government informant, a decision based on a pragmatic desire to avoid jail time, among other motivations. In a scene near the end, for example, when Lucas and Roberts meet, the former attempts to bribe the latter. Soon they realize that they have mutually beneficial interests; the Italians and corrupt cops. At first, Roberts tries to convince Lucas to become an informant by using the language of civil rights activism: ROBERTS :

Apart from the fact that they [the Italians] hate you personally, they

hate what you represent. FRANK :

I don’t represent nothin’ but Frank Lucas.

ROBERTS :

A black businessman like you? You represent progress. The kind of

progress that’s going to see them lose a lot of money. With you out of the way, everything can return to normal. This exchange is followed by Frank’s brief reminiscence of an incident during his childhood when the local police murdered his cousin for looking at a white woman. The connection is thus made between the history of state-condoned racial violence and Lucas’s criminal behavior (loosely echoing a similar connection in Malcolm X). But rather than elaborate on the connection, the gangster concludes, “I don’t give a fuck about no police!” This dialogue is one of American Gangster’s rare direct acknowledgments of race. Another is Lucas’s repeatedly stated desire to be his own boss, which references Harlem’s history of white ownership. Later in the same scene, and after asking Roberts if the lawman wants the names of organized crime figures, Lucas follows with: “You want gangsters? Pick one. Jew gangsters. Mick gangsters. Guineas. They been bleeding Harlem dry since they got off the boat, Ritchie. I don’t give a fuck about no crime figures.” His observation suggests that Lucas’s business decisions may have been based on the desire to stop white outsiders from taking economic advantage of the community. Instead, his elimination of

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the middleman is not so much an act of solidarity as it is a means for him to bleed the area himself; as he says, “I don’t represent nothin’ but Frank Lucas.” Despite initial appearances then, the scene does not suggest that Lucas’s political or social enlightenment; rather it illustrates the beginning of the pair’s relationship, with Roberts acquiring evidence against organized crime figures and corrupt police and Lucas receiving a reduced sentence for his cooperation. The scene ends with a montage of shots of Lucas working with Roberts, interspersed with the arrests of different cops and crime figures. In the sequence, Lucas is smiling and cooperative, and the overall suggestion is one of mutual respect between the men, thus uniting their heroism as much as their plotlines, and making Lucas a hero of a different order. In reality, Lucas became an informant only after he was convicted and sentenced to seventy years in prison. In Jacobson’s article and the press surrounding the film, Lucas denies cooperating with the police, despite the fact that he served only five years on the charges and entered witness protection in 1977. Lucas was sent back to jail in 1984 on another drug charge, for which he was imprisoned until 1991. It was during this latter trial that the actual Richie Roberts acted as Lucas’s defense attorney. (Roberts passed the bar in 1971 and left the Essex County Police Force in the 1970s.) The film ends with a shot of Lucas leaving prison in 1991, in which he’s overshadowed by a changed Harlem, a transition that the audience hears rather than sees: Public Enemy’s “Can’t Truss It” rises on the soundtrack as the screen fades to black. Following his release from prison, Lucas maintained a low profile until Jacobson’s article was published in 2000. A follow-up article by Jacobson in 2007 (in conjunction with the production of American Gangster) and a memoir, Original Gangster: The Real Life Story of One of America’s Most Notorious Drug Lords (with Aliya S. King), continued Lucas’s notoriety thirty years after his initial rise to fame. Ironically, this newfound celebrity is based on the experiences of a different time and place, suggesting that the gangster either could not or would not adapt to the new Harlem.

Where’s Harlem?: The Absence of Cityspace in American Gangster How does Harlem resonate in American Gangster’s narrative of an African American drug dealer? And how might the film be a prime example of a history film that says more about the time in which it was made than the time in which it was set? For the answer to these questions, we must first return to the original Mark Jacobson feature from 2000. On the face of it, “The Return of Superfly” is a simple profile of a notorious but bygone New York personality. But why would Jacobson write, and the glossy New York magazine publish, an extended article about an aged Harlem drug dealer who had not lived in the neighborhood since the 1970s?

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The answer is contained within the article, which uses Lucas’s memories of the area as the framework for presenting a Harlem of yesteryear to readers who may or may not have been alive when the gangster was at his peak. The piece is redolent with references to a different time and place, starting with its basic format, which takes the form of an excursion, a “whirlwind retrospective of his [Lucas’s] life and times.”67 The tour begins on 116th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard68 and wends its way around 113th and Eighth, Lenox Avenue, 123rd Street, 135th and Seventh (the former location of Small’s Paradise), ending up where it began, on 116th Street, “now part of Harlem’s nascent real-estate boom.” With its spatial organization Jacobson’s piece becomes just as much a salvage anthropology, detailing a disappearing Harlem, as it is a profile of a long-forgotten drug dealer. It even, perhaps unwittingly, illustrates Lucas’s erasure from most New Yorkers’ minds: for example, at one point the author and Lucas contact Sterling Johnson, the former narcotics prosecutor responsible for jailing the gangster. Upon answering the phone Johnson, now a judge in New York, replies, “Frank Lucas? Is that mother still living?” Indeed, the film asks the same question about Harlem, even as it calls upon the neighborhood’s legacy for audience appeal. Whereas the Jacobson piece foregrounds the role of Harlem in Lucas’s life— charting his arrival in, as he calls it “Harlem USA” in the mid-1940s through the present—American Gangster is less dependent on the neighborhood for narrative significance. Many scenes are shot on location in Harlem; however, because the story is split between Lucas and Roberts, nearly the same amount of screen time is spent in New Jersey, where Roberts worked first as a detective and then in the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office before heading the state’s Bureau of Narcotics. Other locations include North Carolina, Thailand, and Lucas’s mother’s suburban estate, which may be located in New Jersey, Westchester County, or elsewhere (the film never specifies). Lucas’s home address is as unclear as his mother’s, though it is located somewhere in Manhattan. It’s easy to assume that it is Harlem because the neighborhood houses his business interests, and Lucas spends his time in a coffee shop located on 116th Street. Furthermore, Lucas’s mentor, Bumpy, made his home in the neighborhood, which we learn early in the narrative when the elder man’s post-funeral reception is hosted in the wood-lined, richly appointed rooms of his large, prewar apartment. But Lucas’s postwar luxury apartment has no discernible Harlem markers inside or out. Instead, its views of towering buildings, its exterior awnings, and its uniformed doormen suggest that Lucas’s home may be located in either Midtown Manhattan or the Upper East Side (a fact further supported by the appearance of his Chanel-clad, white real estate agent) rather than Harlem. Besides a few exterior shots of recognizable monuments, like the Lenox Lounge, the film’s Harlem sections lack detail, suggesting either that the Harlem of

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Lucas’s time had disappeared by 2007—a fact supported by Jacobson’s observation in 2000 that “little about Harlem has remained the same”—or that Harlem was never important to the actual Lucas, a sharecropper’s son from North Carolina who chose, at the height of his notoriety and success, to move to Teaneck, New Jersey. As all this indicates, Harlem, at least of the 1970s, is not a visible, readable presence in the film (despite the fact that the film’s massive budget would have allowed for the presentation of a plausible historical mise-en-scène). And yet Harlem is not wholly absent either. Indeed, the neighborhood—or meaningful traces of its history as an African American and community—are evident from the very first scenes of American Gangster through its ending in 1991. In significant ways, the cityspace functions in a manner similar to the way it did in the black gangster films of the 1930s or in Bill Duke’s Hoodlum, when actual location shooting meant less to audiences than the fact that the film was set in “Harlem,” a space that resonated with promise and possibility. The earlier films’ thoroughly modern presentation of Harlem through the conventions of a recognizable and popular genre equated the neighborhood with the rest of the nation at the same time that it remained a specifically African American space. Likewise, in American Gangster, “Harlem” is again activated as a signifier, but rather than asserting African American modernity, it is marshaled as a sign of contemporary globalization and its effects on a community. In short, the film is about changing economics, and Harlem is the microcosm—albeit an exceptional one considering its history—for national and international trends. In making such connections, the film returns us to the concepts of citizenship and belonging central to African American culture for centuries, and particularly relevant to the construction of Harlem as the center of black politics and aesthetics. To understand this point, we must return to the beginning of the film and the scene between Bumpy and Lucas. I started this discussion by suggesting that in American Gangster’s opening scene we can spot the traces of a temporal schizophrenia. Johnson’s harangue against large supermarkets, McDonald’s, and big-box electronics stores is a lament for the past, when, according to the elder gangster, there was “pride of ownership” and “personal service.”Johnson identifies chain stores like the one they are in as what’s “wrong with America,” and, by extension, Harlem. The film transitions from this critique, and instead uses Johnson’s lament, “What right do they have cutting out the suppliers, the middlemen, buying direct, putting Americans out of work . . .” as a business model. Lucas takes Johnson’s words as a lesson on circumventing his Italian heroin suppliers and going directly to the source in Southeast Asia, and the film details his trips into Thailand on two different occasions.69 Later in the film, Lucas describes this organizational structure as his guarantee of autonomy and control over his own business. Nonetheless, this discourse on self-determination

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suggests a shift from uplift versions of the self-effacing and community-minded black gangster from the 1930s (and which Bumpy still represented in the ’60s) to a prototype of the American gangster as a global capitalist. In this model the drug trade in Harlem ironically becomes part of an American business ethos in which neoliberal economics—for example, outsourcing to Southeast Asia to increase profits—come to bear (often to negative effect) on local relationships. Thus, the film’s title, American Gangster, resonates in more ways than simply suggesting Lucas’s integration into mainstream America. While much of the United States has been taken over by multinational corporations, such investment has been particularly fraught in Harlem, where the residents fear the loss of the neighborhood’s African American, working-class character as large chains and luxury condos move into the area. Development has been both welcomed and maligned since the 1980s, when the city first auctioned off two groups of vacant neighborhood brownstones. This first wave of gentrification was initially led by black middle-class professionals and was viewed as a mostly welcome investment in the neighborhood before it was cut short by the market crash of 1987.70 The establishment of a system of public and private development funds, the UMEZ, by the Clinton administration in 1994 once again sparked fears about the effects of gentrification, development, and displacement among neighborhood residents. One of the first UMEZ projects was the redevelopment of Harlem’s storied 125th Street, which enabled the influx of a number of major chains, such as Starbucks, Old Navy, and the Disney Store to the area. The success of early development ventures led to increased retail, business, and residential construction in the blocks surrounding Harlem’s main corridor, particularly to the south of 125th Street and stretching to the top of Central Park at 110th Street, the most attractive areas for Manhattanites looking to stay in the borough but who could no longer afford prices farther downtown. Clinton’s decision to move his offices to the area in 2001 even further cemented the neighborhood’s attractiveness for outside, often white, home buyers and investors. Development in Harlem proceeded apace in the late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, with thousands of new housing units added to the area over the decade. Many of the new, mostly “luxury” condos and co-ops were built on vacant lots or on the sites of abandoned buildings. While some neighborhood politicians and activists argue that gentrification in Harlem has not displaced residents because the neighborhood’s development does not follow classic gentrification patterns—in other words, residents were not physically removed to build new housing units—the fear of displacement continues. According to Timothy Williams of the New York Times, “apprehension about gentrification has become a constant” as the influx of new buildings has forced out longtime residents who cannot afford the area’s new “affordable” housing or the more specialized commercial interests, like the gourmet food market

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Citarella or star chef Marcus Samuelsson’s new iteration of the Red Rooster, that are drawn to higher-income communities. In 2008, Williams observed, “the average price for a new apartment in Harlem hit $900,000 [while] the average household income remains less than $25,000.”71 Williams’s piece discusses the mixed feelings of residents along 125th Street regarding the changes to the neighborhood, and describes what is almost a schizophrenia—relief that certain elements of urban blight, decay, and criminality have all but vanished from the streets combined with a sense of loss for familiar faces and places. A similar sense of schizophrenia is also evident in American Gangster’s acknowledgment that the business practices accepted by Bumpy and other older Harlem gangsters have ceded way to the likes of Lucas, Nicky Barnes, and others. Of course, Lucas went to jail in the 1970s, and both the film and the Jacobson articles suggest that Harlem had already changed when he left in 1991. By the release of the film in 2007, Lucas’s stomping grounds would have been even more unrecognizable. In fact, the year after American Gangster’s release, Williams wrote another article for the New York Times, profiling a new luxury condo development on the corner of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 118th Street, near the “focal point of Frank Lucas’s heroin operation.”72 Williams ends the article with the observation that Lucas, whose drug money was confiscated by the government, “will apparently not be among those vying for” the building’s $3.5 million-penthouse, as he can no longer afford real estate in the area.73 In the same article Williams identifies another component of gentrification and change, the fear among local residents that Harlem “will cease to be synonymous with black urban America.” In many ways this consternation is connected to the overall population shifts that have occurred in Harlem over the decades as many working-class black households have been priced out of the neighborhood. The result, report census figures from 2008, is that Harlem is “no longer majority black.” In fact, according to Sam Roberts, by 2008, Harlem’s black residents (African American and African migrants) had declined to 40 percent of the area’s population.74 In Central Harlem the population increased for the first time since the 1940s, “but its black population . . . is smaller than at any time since the twenties.” Meanwhile, Harlem’s nonHispanic white population grew from 1.5 to 4.3 percent between 1990 and 2005 and at least double that between 2005 and 2008.75 The result, according to Williams, is that Harlem “has become a twenty-first-century laboratory for integration.”76 This particular version of integration is part of a “wider trend across the nation reshaping poorer black enclaves,”77 but it rings triply ironic when its location is taken into account. First, it refers to the integration and gentrification of an African American neighborhood by middle- and upper-middle-class whites. Harlem’s history has always been tied to development—even more so

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than other neighborhoods in Manhattan. What first began as a northern idyll for wealthy German and Jewish families looking for modern conveniences, sun, and space, was ceded to African American residents looking for the same after a market collapse deflated property values early in the twentieth century. At that time, Harlem became a black community out of necessity as much as choice, as many of the city’s neighborhoods practiced a system of de facto Jim Crow, leaving black New Yorkers and new arrivals to the city with few options. Harlem’s abundance of “elegant flats” seemed like the promised land. By the Depression years, the area was plagued by overcrowding and substandard conditions, a situation that worsened from the 1950s onward, sparking an exodus of the neighborhood’s black residents with the means to live in marginally better neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.78 To a certain extent, therefore, the recent demographic changes can be interpreted as a migration into the area by the very same demographic targeted by early developers, wealthy white families looking for modern conveniences and spacious apartments. Harlem’s stock of below-market brownstones and new full-service buildings offer both elegant flats (now luxury condominiums) and space for less money than comparable places in other parts of Manhattan. The second irony is also related to Harlem’s status as a, if not the, symbol of black America, because integration in this context is connected to the area’s and the African American community’s relationship to the nation as a whole. In the Jacobson piece, for example, Lucas remembers his first moments in Harlem: “I got to 114th Street. I had never seen so many black people in one place in all my life. It was a world of black people. And I just shouted out: ‘Hello, Harlem . . . hello, Harlem, USA!”79 Lucas’s memories resonate with other migrant’s tales, from those first discussed in Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902) in chapter 1 to the stories published during the Harlem Renaissance by writers such as Rudolph Fisher, Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, to Malcolm X’s memories of his arrival in the 1940s. Recent black migrants continue to relate their experiences of first alighting in the neighborhood and many make references to a historical Harlem; for example, in Harlem Is Nowhere, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts situates her migrant’s story in the context of other Harlem Renaissance narratives and images, nostalgically mingling her contemporary experience with fictional versions from the past.80 But how does this resonate when one takes into account that Harlem, like many predominately black urban centers, was never really considered part of America? Since the term “New Negro” first entered the lexicon in 1895, African American politicians and intellectuals were determined to redefine what it meant to be black in the United States at the turn of the century. By the 1910s and early ’20s, Harlem had become a crucial component in this redefinition of black life, as the best and the brightest of the race—Du Bois’s Talented Tenth— were drawn to the area. Despite appearances, particularly during the Jazz Age,

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Harlem was a segregated neighborhood; whites may have played in the area’s clubs and speakeasies (many of them off limits to the area’s black residents), but they returned home at the end of the evening. From the 1950s through the ’70s, most Harlemites with the means left the area, unofficially segregating it economically at the moment when desegregation was being litigated and won in the nation’s courts. The latest phase in Harlem’s history is one in which integration seems to have been achieved, but it is still fraught with race and class tensions, in which the term refers to an influx of whites in a previously (unofficially) segregated space. The final irony of Harlem’s new integration is connected to the ways in which the area has been reconfigured in the wake of redevelopment. Again, this returns us to Bumpy’s complaint in American Gangster that Harlem had become a place of chain stores and franchises. While Bumpy’s harangue is fictional and set nearly a half century in the past, it nonetheless refers to contemporary changes in the area that have more fully integrated the neighborhood into national and global networks of capital distribution; for example, “Harlem USA,” a mall-like complex built on 125th Street in 2000, houses a bank, a Marshall’s, an H&M, a Staples, and a Magic Johnson Multiplex Theater, the same chain stores found in other parts of the city, the state, the nation, and perhaps the world.81 The project, suggest its developers, has “played a pivotal role in sparking a Harlem renaissance.”82 Unlike the Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, however, this new moment in the neighborhood’s history is fueled by consumption—of clothing made in overseas sweatshops, fast food, and Hollywood fare—and not on the cultural production of nearly a century ago. When viewed in this respect, it is clear that Harlem has become “Harlem USA,” but not the way that the early New Negroes may have intended. So where does this leave Harlem? The continuing nostalgia for Harlem past, as presented in contemporary films like Hoodlum and American Gangster, and advertised by the Langston Condominiums, the Lenox Condominiums, One Striver’s Row, and other recent luxury condo developments in the area, suggests the commodification of a mythical “Mecca of the New Negro” that references African American culture but is often more about real estate and global conglomerates, such as Starbucks, Old Navy, and the Gap. Moreover, the use of gangster conventions to explore African American urban life, whether from the 1930s, the ’70s, the ’90s, or most recently in Hoodlum and American Gangster, suggests something equally compelling. The making of legends out of murderers, pimps, dealers, and racketeers links, of course, to African American oral traditions of the trickster, of succeeding in an environment of legal, social, political, and economic limitations. But the films’ discourses on uplift and economic independence illustrate the continuing battles between identity and capital waged, sometimes violently, in Harlem. Denzel Washington may play Frank Lucas as a hero in American Gangster, but in terms of economic

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self-determination, Casper Holstein—the only gangster who owned property in the neighborhood and who funded the arts—may end up being the true hero of this very American story. Harlem may be a site of memory, but it has increasingly become a “brand,”83 and its “essential selling point remains the authentic black experience”84 from decades ago.

Conclusion ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Making and Remaking a Promised Land Harlem’s Continuing Revisions

As Harlem confronts the pressures of “development,” it is being forced to redefine itself, and issues of isolation and integration have taken on new meanings. This redefinition has a profoundly visual component. —Alice Attie, Harlem on the Verge

In her afterword to Harlem on the Verge, a collection of portraits of neighborhood people and places taken between 2000 and 2001, photographer Alice Attie ruminates on the power of the photograph to document a moment in history, the “now” of her subjects’ lives.1 Nevertheless, the images also capture a disappearing Harlem, or what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as a “vanishing present.”2 Citing Walter Benjamin’s definition of the photographic aura, Attie asserts, “[I]t is by way of the image that the culture’s memory passes through the eye. The photograph becomes the mark of a crisis, a rupture and the beginning of historical mourning.”3 Robin D. G. Kelley notes this aspect of Attie’s work as well in his introduction to Harlem on the Verge, and argues that the photographer “sets her sights on capturing the old Harlem before it completely disappears, the Harlem that will become our next nostalgic memory, our future golden age.”4 Memory trace, vanishing present, historical mourning, and/or nostalgic memory: what does Harlem signify at the beginning of the twenty-first century? And why do we continue to return to the photographic image—still or moving—to explore Harlem’s many meanings? Attie explains in the afterword to Harlem on the Verge that she wanted to document the “ominous” changes occurring in the area, changes that have led to the “closing of small neighborhood shops and the appearance of large retailers.”5 To that end she created a series of images that combine portraits of the neighborhood’s black (African American, West Indian, African) residents with uninhabited shots of storefronts, signage, murals, and graffiti.6 Most of the images in Harlem on the Verge are formally composed and take architecture, 192

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particularly closed stores or empty buildings, as their primary subject. The portraits of people are equally formal; subjects of varying ages sit or stand facing the camera (in this way they resemble the majority of Attie’s other work, which does not focus on Harlem). Harlemites are often situated in the middle of the frame, posed and frozen in time. A few more casual, less composed street scenes are mixed in with the formal portraits. These capture people on the move and unaware of the camera. The combination of images broadcasts an overwhelming sense of a vanishing moment in time, an illustration, perhaps, that Harlem is “on the verge” of becoming something else. In her documentation project, Attie reflects a strain of nostalgia in evidence in the majority of written (particularly in the popular press) and visual (photographic and cinematic) projects about Harlem from the past two or three decades. Here we can look back to Barron Claiborne’s reinterpretation of James VanDerZee’s portrait or to the gangster films discussed in the previous chapter. In this, and in the subjects she chose to photograph, Attie’s Harlem series references a number of the themes that Making a Promised Land has explored and problematized, especially those related to African American visibility, identity, and citizenship and the role of photography and film in the making of a New Negro for a new century. Therefore, I will conclude with a brief discussion of the ways in which Attie’s images touch on the main concerns of the earlier chapters. The preceding analysis of Harlem and African American representation has covered a lot of ground: spatial and temporal, literal and metaphoric, fiction and nonfiction. With the establishment of the area as an African American neighborhood in the early twentieth century, Harlem became the primary location for the construction of a new African American identity by black Americans from different social, economic, and geographic places. This selfconstitution often was communicated visually, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Paris Exposition photographs from 1900 were one of earliest instances of the political use of technology to provide visual evidence of African American humanity, modernity, equality, and beauty, thus beginning a long and fraught history of attaching truth claims to technologies of the visible (as a means of combating centuries of caricature and stereotype). Such a project—the marshaling of technology as a tool to represent a race and a place—is always already fraught with detours, dead ends, and one-way streets, a fact that is especially apparent when the space is Harlem, the symbolic, if not real, Mecca of black life and culture. Harlem was not only the promised land for new migrants seeking relief from poverty and discrimination elsewhere; it also became the setting for African American political, social, and aesthetic debates. Film and photography became enmeshed in these explorations, often functioning in an evidentiary manner, either to posit racial progress and equality or to examine the social effects of economic, social, and political segregation and discrimination.

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FIGURE 29. Alice Attie, Two Boys, from Harlem on the Verge (2003). Courtesy of

the artist.

Attie’s Harlem portraits unconsciously encompass the gambit of African American representation from the twentieth century. They offer, for instance, examples of the neighborhood’s best and brightest: children dressed in school uniforms, holding books and backpacks; newlyweds in the back of a limousine; and Harlemites of all generations dressed in their Sunday best, in front, beside, or within places of worship. Such images, which could have been produced decades ago by the black bourgeoisie, present versions of African American progress and respectability through the heteronormative codes of family, education, and religion. In the past, comparable portraits provided an alternative to narratives of inner-city venality and despair. In the present, the effect of Attie’s portraits is similar. The portraits of progress are mixed with those that tell another story. Here Attie offers images of abandoned storefronts, empty lots, and of Harlemites, particularly of young men, who connote the neighborhood’s more recent legacy of poverty, drugs, crime, unemployment, and general decay. One image in particular echoes certain still and moving images already discussed in this book. It is a photograph of two young men standing in front of a graffiti-covered garage door. Like many of the portraits in the Harlem series, the image is tightly framed; the two men are shot from the chest up and stand side-by-side with each forming a vertical border to the image. Both face the camera, but only one meets our gaze. The second teen stares at something out of the frame. His facial

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expression reads as something between despair and depression. His friend’s expression, on the other hand, is more aggressively sullen. The portrait’s look and overall meaning is reminiscent of the New York Photo League images from the late 1930s that appeared in Fortune and Look magazines, which were discussed in chapter 3. One photo from the Look spread, captioned “Five Social Problems,” shows a group of five young neighborhood boys paired with prose suggesting that their environment will inevitably lead to their demise. Such images of black male youth were picked up elsewhere, for example in The Quiet One (Sidney Meyers with Helen Levitt and James Agee, 1948) and The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, 1963), both of which used nonfiction conventions to present linked narratives of urban despair and black criminality, and again in the gangsta/gangster figures in New Jack City (Mario Van Peebles, 1991). While Attie’s image stands alone, without any textual accompaniment, it sends a similar message. The teens are framed so that little of the surrounding space is visible. They lean against a graffiti-covered, dilapidated garage door with a “No Parking” sign hanging between and slightly above the two. The overall message is one of abjection and containment mixed with anger. Attie’s portraits of progress and despair, which look to the past as much as the present, are counterbalanced with images that acknowledge Harlem’s present-day redevelopment. Like the others already discussed, such images mesh the past and the present to present a new Harlem. Two photographs in particular are exemplary examples of the juxtaposition of the old and the new. The first is a portrait of a well-dressed older African American man leaning against the window of the 125th Street Starbucks. The image is a collage of times and places; the man’s white shoes, dapper suit, and straw hat are traces of another moment in Harlem’s history, while the Starbuck’s logo and gleaming facade communicate the homogenizing effects of the multinational chains making their way into the neighborhood. The man’s presence in the frame anchors the image to Harlem, while the logo functions as a free-floating signifier of global capitalism. The portrait is also striking in that its composition, unlike the majority of more formally composed images in the series, is less constricted. The man is surrounded by space on all sides of the frame, suggesting more freedom than that enjoyed by the young men. Likewise, another portrait suggests the tensions between the past and the present through references to global economics. In this example, a young man similar in age to the two individuals from the earlier portrait leans against the front of the Disney Store on 125th Street. A Mickey Mouse cutout, visible through the plate glass, looms over him. While the logo for the chain is not as visible as the Starbucks sign in the previous image, the store’s partial signage and the clearly identifiable figure of Mickey identify his location. In this image, the young man is dwarfed by a store that is not only a representative of a massive global operation but one that has a long history of televisual and

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FIGURE 30. Alice Attie, Disney, from Harlem on the Verge (2003). Courtesy of the

artist.

cinematic representations that include some of the very same racial stereotyping that the black bourgeoisie were seeking to dispel (the most egregious being, perhaps, Song of the South from 1946).7 If this is Harlem’s “future golden age,” then what does it say of the changes taking place in what was once the center of African American culture?

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The images return us to the tropes of citizenship and belonging that were a core component of New Negro ideology in the early twentieth century and that continue to be one of the defining factors in African American—and, by extension, Harlem’s—self-definition. Making a Promised Land has discussed the various visual iterations of African American citizenship over the past century, from the black bourgeoisie’s pursuit of self-definition through portraiture, through attempts by numbers bankers and other cinematic gangsters to attain the American Dream via alternative economics, to the latest generation of Harlemites who have embraced (in various capacities) global capitalism as a sign of community integration. The Attie portraits reverberate with these relationships, often by juxtaposing seemingly disparate elements in the same frame; the elderly dandy and the promise of a latte, for example. The preceding chapter discussed the influx of multinational development dollars into Harlem and the resultant changes in the community’s racial, ethnic, and economic demographics. The ironic culmination of such changes, I explain, are symbolized in the “Harlem USA” retail project developed by the Gotham Organization with funding from the UMEZ and others. In an interesting twist on this symbolism, Attie’s series includes a portrait of a billboard advertising the “Harlem USA” location of Old Navy with the words, “If you’re here, you’re near . . . Old Navy.” The words “Harlem USA” appear below the text, following the first appearance of the store name. To a certain extent, the billboard functions like the majority of recent Harlem photography and film, in which Harlem is a symbol rather than an actual space. In the billboard image, for example, “Harlem USA” is merely the site of Old Navy. The “here” of Harlem is only relevant in as much as it is near the subject of the billboard, a multinational corporation. Attie returns to the concept of “Harlem USA” a few pages later. Unlike the earlier images in Harlem on the Verge, which focus on retail sites, these later portraits return us to more symbolic notions of citizenship through the presence of the American flag. One image in particular serves as an apt conclusion for this discussion of African American visibility and citizenship: in it three young boys stand side by side. Like the earlier image of the two teens, the portrait is tightly framed, with little surrounding space. Each boy wears a shirt that reads, “Place America 2000/a brand new century,” emblazoned on an American flag logo. Two of the boys stare at the camera, their expressions bold and direct. The third looks off to the left, his facial expression and crossed arms connoting a sullenness similar to that of the teens in the Two Boys portrait. Like the Look images from the late 1930s, the young boys are embedded in a particular place and time. But unlike the earlier images, Attie’s portrait places its subjects in a national rather than a local context, suggesting that Harlem’s integration into twenty-first-century America may be complete, whether they—or we—like it or not.

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FIGURE 31. Alice Attie, Three Boys, from Harlem on the Verge (2003). Courtesy of the

artist.

Throughout this study, I have argued that every twentieth-century iteration of African American Harlem takes us back to the photograph and to the cinema, which have created an increasingly self-referential system of signs for the neighborhood and, by extension, for African American and American experience more generally. Over the decades, Harlem has posed and reposed for us, suggesting a place that is at one and the same time resolutely historical and constantly in flux: material and imaginary, African American and American, national and multinational. Attie’s Harlem on the Verge begs the question, “on the verge of what?” Perhaps the question is less a description of a present-future dichotomy (illustrated in Robin Kelley’s concept of the future golden age) and more a statement of Harlem’s legacy of transformation and redefinition. Indeed, the virtue of film in particular is that it has been able to capture this very kinetic aspect of the neighborhood’s multiple identities over time, across genres, and in different industrial situations, from independent films made on shoestring budgets to multimillion-dollar Hollywood productions. In this context, the most recent historical films set in Harlem are not so different from their earlier counterparts, which refracted the conditions and concerns of their contemporary moment. All are struggling to visualize Harlem’s continually shifting spatial and human boundaries.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION.

THE ERA OF THE NEW NEGRO

1. Charles S. Johnson, “The New Frontage on American Life,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1992), 279. 2. See, for example, John L. Jackson Jr., Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Monique M. Taylor, Harlem: Between Heaven and Hell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and John L. Jackson Jr., Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. 35–62. 3. Jackson, Harlemworld, 21. The latter phrase refers to David Levering Lewis’s work on the 1920s and the cultural and aesthetic works associated with the Harlem Renaissance. See David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin Books, 1997). 4. The Afro-American Realty Company’s prospectus, for example, identified white prejudice as the cause for substandard housing conditions in black communities and argued that this situation would persist unless ownership and management were in the hands of African American landlords and management companies. After 1908, Payton continued to handle Harlem real estate under his newly established Philip A. Payton Jr. Company, and he was soon joined in his development ventures by other black-owned companies, most notably Nail and Parker (est. 1909), and white-owned firms like Samuel A. Kelsey and David H. Massey. By 1920, there were a total of twentyone black-owned real estate companies and innumerable white-owned establishments with offices in Harlem, “specializing in uptown property” (Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890–1930 [New York: Harper and Row, 1963], 119). At this time, the black population made up the majority of residents on Harlem’s west side. 5. The post–Civil War Reconstruction era lasted from 1867 to 1877, at which point many civil rights gains, such as suffrage, were reversed over the course of the ensuing decades. For more on the history of Reconstruction, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: American’s Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); and John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 6. Osofsky, Harlem, 119. In addition, many black residents of the Tenderloin faced eviction owing to the planned development of the original Pennsylvania Station, designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White. The station opened in 1910 and operated for fifty years before being razed in 1963 to clear ground for Madison Square Garden.

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7. Qtd. in “The Negro in New York,” Harper’s Weekly, December 1900. The article appears in Allon Schoener, ed., Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968 (New York: New Press, 1995), 21. 8. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (1902; New York: Signet Classics, 1999), 46. In this passage, Dunbar’s omniscient narrator presents a view consistent with white attitudes toward African Americans and to black bourgeois opinions toward the growing presence of migrants in the city. Influenced by Social Darwinism, these beliefs shared the notion that immigrants and migrants did not have the mettle to succeed in modern, urban life. 9. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (1930; New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), 147. 10. The transaction was unprecedented for its value, more than $1 million, and was covered extensively in the black press. See, for example, “Nail and Parker ‘Pull Off’ Big Deal,” New York Age, March 30, 1911, the text of which appears in Schoener, Harlem on My Mind, 23. The black church has been a central player in Harlem’s development and redevelopment over the years. Since 1989, for example, the Abyssinian Baptist Church has financed residential and retail projects in the neighborhood through its Abyssinian Development Corporation. 11. Osofsky, Harlem, 112. In fact, most of the prominent black churches led the way by purchasing property and by shifting their congregations to Harlem in the years between 1900 and 1920. Many, like Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church, also became landlords, selling their downtown properties and purchasing land and real estate in Harlem while values were still depressed. 12. Osofsky, Harlem, 25. 13. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1992), 9. 14. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 136. 15. Ibid., 133. 16. Ibid. 17. Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 56. 18. Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 179. 19. The reference to Powell’s comments, along with Walton’s opinions on moviegoers, appears in Lester A. Walton, “Music and the Stage,” New York Age, December 15, 1910, 7. 20. Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 54. 21. Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995), 178. 22. Qtd. in ibid., 179. 23. Norman, based in Jacksonville, Florida, specialized in westerns starring Bill Pickett, a well-known African American cowboy. Even though Norman’s films, such as The Bull Dogger (1921), were westerns, their setting in the all-black town of Boley, Oklahoma, conformed with the aims of African American uplift: self-determination and race pride. Other Norman titles include The Crimson Skull (1921), also set in Boley and

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featuring Pickett; Regeneration (1923); and The Flying Ace (1926). The latter film is about a World War I pilot who returns home a hero and saves his love interest and her family from thieves. For more on Norman, see Phyllis R. Klotman, “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: The Flying Ace, the Norman Company, and the Micheaux Connection,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, ed. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 161–177; Gloria J. Gibson-Hudson, “The Norman Film Manufacturing Company,” Black Film Review 7, no. 4 (1993): 16–20; Matthew Bernstein and Dana F. White, “‘Scratching Around’ in a ‘Fit of Insanity’: The Norman Film Manufacturing Company and the Race Film Business in the 1920s,” Griffithiana 62–63 (May 1998): 81–128. 24. “Harlem,” Fortune 20, no. 1 (July 1939): 78 (emphasis added). 25. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 8. 26. Alice Attie, Harlem on the Verge (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003), 118. CHAPTER 1.

AFRICAN AMERICAN AESTHETICS AND THE CITY

1. This is especially true given that the article from which this quotation is taken, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1897. It was republished in 1903. 2. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classic, 1982), 54. Paul Gilroy identifies The Souls of Black Folk as a “poetics of race and place” that moves between the urban and the rural, between the North and the South, and, between the United States and Europe. Gilroy’s argument appears in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 137. He is specifically discussing Robert Stepto’s reading of The Souls of Black Folk in Stepto’s From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979). 3. Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address, September 18, 1895,” in Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift, ed. Jacqueline M. Moore (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003), 127. 4. In 1895, Du Bois wrote to Washington, commending the latter for the speech and describing it as “a word fitly spoken.” David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 173. By 1903, Du Bois critiqued Washington’s policies in “Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training,” in The Souls of Black Folk, 79–95. 5. Du Bois, “Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training,” 94. 6. Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988), 43. For the original citation, see W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem, ed. Booker T. Washington et al. (1903; Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003), 33–75. 7. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 33. 8. John L. Jackson Jr., Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 26. 9. Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 157.

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10. Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 103. For more on Du Bois’s “gender specific” framework of race leadership, see Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), esp. 9–41. 11. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 76. 12. At the turn of the century, a number of tracts appeared in the black press, identifying the potential temptations of the city, particularly for women, and outlining strategies for avoiding vice. For more on this, see Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 738–755; Mary Carbine, “ ‘The Finest outside the Loop’: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–1928,” Camera Obscura 23 (Summer 1991): 8–41; and Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 13. Charles Scruggs, Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 18. 14. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 75. 15. Carbine, “ ‘The Finest Outside the Loop,’” 14. See also Jacqueline Stewart, “Negroes Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 650–677. 16. Anne Elizabeth Carroll argues, for example, that the Crisis often equated real estate with success. See Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 39–42. 17. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 166. 18. Ibid., 93. 19. Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 61. 20. For more on Du Bois’s European influences, see David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Harry Holt, 1993); Russell A. Berman, “Du Bois and Wagner: Race, Nation, and Culture between the United States and Germany,” German Quarterly 70, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 123–135; and Francis L. Broderick, “German Influence on the Scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Phylon Quarterly 19, no. 4 (1958): 367–371. 21. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 77. 22. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 133. 23. Scruggs, Sweet Home, 45. Dunbar did not suggest that Virginia was preferable to New York. In Virginia, the Hamiltons’ troubles begin, and they are shunned rather than being supported by the community. Their experiences in the South are what drive them to the city. 24. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (1902; New York: Signet Classics, 1999), 59–60. 25. Ibid., 138 (original emphasis). 26. Stewart suggests, for example, that many of the early (preclassical) “watermelon eating” films revived “southern iconography (returning the Blacks to the plantation)” at the turn of the century (Migrating to the Movies, 55). Such preferences for popular entertainments—and the concerns raised by such pastimes—were not limited to African American urban spectatorship. For more on the viewing practices of urban

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women, see Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 27. Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky, 1–16. 28. Dunbar, Sport of the Gods, 66. 29. Thomas L. Morgan, “The City as Refuge: Constructing Urban Blackness in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” African American Review 38, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 204. 30. Ibid., 220. 31. Ibid., 221. 32. Stewart discusses this duality in relation to Chicago’s Black Belt establishments: “Community life in Chicago was enabled for better . . . and/or for worse . . . by public spheres that were more commercialized but also more ‘free’ that the traditional structures of social life in the South” (Migrating to the Movies, 149). 33. Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods, 64. 34. Ibid., 83. 35. Qtd. in Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky,”64. 36. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 184. 37. In fact, Dunbar’s novel was adapted for the screen by New York–based Reol Productions in 1921. Reol, a mixed-race production company, made films between 1920 and 1924. The Sport of the Gods was the firm’s first film, and like all of the Reol productions, very little is known about it (no known prints survive). It is significant, however, that one of the most respected of the race film concerns chose Dunbar’s novel as its first uplift film. Despite the novel’s focus on urban venality, it tells the tale of an upstanding family trying to maintain its virtue in the city. 38. Martha Jane Nadell, Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3. See also Caroline Goeser, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007). 39. Gates, “Trope of a New Negro,” 129. 40. Ibid., 140. The use of Adams’s work suggests a continuation of a specific representation of race men and women to members of the Niagara Movement. These readers would no doubt be drawn from the same readership that formed the basis for Voice of the Negro circulation, along with other magazines catering to the black bourgeoisie (such as Half-Century Magazine). Louis R. Harlan lays out the interesting, though short, history of Voice of the Negro in “Booker T. Washington and the Voice of the Negro, 1904–1907,” Journal of Southern History 45, n0.1 (February 1979): 45–62. In his essay, Harlan suggests that Washington and Emmett Jay Scott “first tried to force the Voice to sing his song and then tried to silence it” (46). It seems as though Washington wanted Voice of the Negro to take on a pro-accommodationist editorial stance. The magazine’s young editor, J. Max Barber, however, was more supportive of the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and the Niagara Movement, much to Washington’s and Scott’s dismay. In its first year of publication, the magazine began to show its political bent. By its second year, it openly supported the Niagara Movement (Barber was in attendance at its inaugural meeting). Harlan charts how Washington and Scott, working with their supporters (like Philip A. Payton Jr. of the Afro-American Realty Company in Harlem) helped bring an end to the magazine.

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41. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 93. Like Tanner, Fuller was educated in Philadelphia and Paris and used European art forms (inspired in part by her work with Auguste Rodin) to explore African American subjectivity in the early twentieth century. Unlike Tanner, however, Fuller’s work, including The Awakening of Ethiopia (1914), combined European and African influences. See Richard J. Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 35–36. 42. Margaret Crumpton Winter and Rhonda Reymond, “Henry Ossawa Tanner and W.E.B. Du Bois: African American Art and ‘High Culture’ at the Turn into the Twentieth Century,” in Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919, ed. Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 235–236. 43. Powell, Black Art, 26. 44. Qtd. in Alan C. Braddock, “Painting the World’s Christ: Tanner, Hybridity, and the Blood of the Holy Land,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of NineteenthCentury Visual Culture 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2004), accessed September 25, 2008, http://www.nineteenthc-artworldwide.org/autumn_04/articles/brad.html. For more on Tanner, see Samella Lewis, African American Art and Artists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), esp. 44–55. 45. Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 18. For more on Agassiz’s daguerreotypes, see Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 38–61; and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brody to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 52–60. For more on the status of the photograph in bourgeois culture, see Allan Sekula’s “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–69; and “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 15–25. 46. Deborah Willis, “The Sociologist’s Eye: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Paris Exposition,” in Library of Congress, A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 52. 47. Du Bois brought the albums to Paris as part of the United States pavilion, though ironically, they, along with other elements of the African American exhibit, were housed in a separate location, and have subsequently been referred to as the “Negro” exhibit. For more on this see David Levering Lewis, “A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois and Black Americans at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Library of Congress, A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 23–50. 48. Smith argues throughout Photography on the Color Line that Du Bois’s portraits created “a contestatory archive, offering a place from which a counterhistory can be imagined and narrated, and as a counterarchive [they] underscore the ways in which both identity and history are founded, at least partially, through representation” (9). 49. Smith, Photography on the Color Line, 76. 50. Ibid., 46. Smith is using the theoretical trope of “signifying” identified by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 51. I’m taking my lead from Homi K. Bhabha’s discussion of mimicry in “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), 121–131.

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52. Smith, Photography on the Color Line, 11–12. Brian Wallis suggests that “the nineteenthcentury photographic portrait was designed to affirm or underscore the white middle-class individual’s right to personhood”(“Black Bodies, White Science,” 55). I draw the concept of the “telling detail” from Allan Sekula’s consideration of the signifying power of photographic elements, inspired itself by Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the photographic portrait (“The Body and the Archive,” 60). 53. bell hooks, “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: New Press, 1994), 48. 54. Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 49–50. 55. Smith, Photography on the Color Line, 6. 56. Lewis, “Small Nation of People,” 33. 57. Willis, “The Sociologist’s Eye,” 54. 58. Qtd. in Lewis, “Small Nation of People,” 33. 59. Rodger C. Birt, “A Life in American Photography,” in VanDerZee: Photographer, 1886–1983, ed. Deborah Willis-Braithwaite (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 39. 60. Smith, Photography on the Color Line, 76. 61. Such minstrel images appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines like New York World and Puck. Joshua Brown, for example, suggests that the rise in mass-circulation newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century resulted in the increased popularity of the comic strip. Many early comic strips, such as Hogan’s Alley and Sambo and His Funny Noises, presented the adventures of African American caricatures. This tradition was continued in early animation by J. Stuart Blackton (a former vaudevillian), among others. See Brown’s commentary in Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 219–221. See also Nadell, Enter the New Negroes, 17. 62. Gates, “Trope of a New Negro,” 150. 63. James H. Dormon, “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The ‘Coon Song’ Phenomenon of the Gilded Age,” American Quarterly 40, n0.4 (December 1988): 450. 64. Ibid., 466. 65. Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in 19th Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press), 71. For more on the class politics of blackface minstrelsy, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 66. Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky,” 23–24. 67. Stewart, Migratingto the Movies, 55. 68. Ibid., 34. 69. Carbine, “ ‘The Finest outside the Loop,’” 14. 70. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 103. 71. Ibid., 116. 72. According to Mary Carbine, “new migrants could reaffirm their ties to the South [by watching minstrel performances] at the same time that they encountered mass entertainment by attending the picture show in the same venue” as many performers from the South (“‘The Finest outside the Loop,’” 22).

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73. Alison Griffiths and James Latham, “Film and Ethnic Identity in Harlem, 1896–1915,” in American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era, ed. Melvin Stokes and Richard Maltby (New York: BFI Publishing, 1999), 57. 74. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 116. 75. Griffiths and Latham, “Film and Ethnic Identity in Harlem,” 57. 76. Ibid., 53. 77. Qtd. in Carbine, “ ‘The Finest outside the Loop,’” 24. 78. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 93. 79. The reference to Powell’s comments, along with Walton’s opinions on moviegoing, appear in Lester A. Walton, “Music and the Stage,” New York Age, December 15, 1910, 7. 80. New York Age, June 6, 1905, 6. 81. Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 177. 82. New York Age, July 27, 1905, 8. The property listings also included apartments in the city’s other areas, such as San Juan Hill, but the Harlem listings, which increased markedly between 1905 and 1910, soon outstripped them. 83. In Word, Image, and the New Negro, Anne Elizabeth Carroll examines the juxtapositions between word and image appearing in the Crisis in the 1910s. According to Carroll, the magazine’s arrangement of image and text created a dialogue between “protest and affirmation” that called out against acts of violence and racism while establishing a “collective identity for African Americans based on the achievements of notable individuals” (39). The New York Age was engaged in a similar dialogue a decade before. 84. Migration, like much of the demographic movement at this time, was predicated on the expansion of New York’s infrastructure, namely, the extension of the elevated rail lines, a project that occurred in three stages. Between 1878 and 1881 the elevated was extended to 129th Street, by 1886 it stretched even farther north, and by 1904 it had reached 144th Street. Early property developers and speculators—during the 1870s and ’80s, for example—took advantage of the rising property values that were an effect of the rail’s expansion, and they profited handsomely from their purchases. This was followed by a second wave of speculation in the late 1890s that “proved often more lucrative than speculation on the Western frontier” (Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto [New York: Harper and Row, 1966], 87). Additionally, City Hall to Harlem was not the only film of its kind. Many early New York–based film companies used the city’s subway system as a subject. See also Interior New York Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1905), 8th Avenue Elevated Train at 112th Street (Ford Educational Weekly, date unknown), and Aerial View of Sixth Ave. Train at 28th, 26th, 24th (Ford Educational Weekly, date unknown). 85. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 22. 86. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 60–61. 87. Bulletin text from the Library of Congress, accessed March 4, 2007, http://memory .loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/varstg:@field(NUMBER+band(varsmp+2412s3). 88. Lee Grieveson, “Gangsters and Governance in the Silent Era,” in Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film, ed. Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 14–15. 89. Ibid., 18.

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90. Ibid., 15. 91. And here the work of Jacob Riis, particularly his photographic study How the Other Half Lives (1890) is relevant for providing visual representations of the city’s crime-ridden and poverty-stricken ethnic enclaves. Originally an article for Scribner’s Magazine, the feature was expanded to book length and included line drawings and photographs taken in the streets, tenements, and bars of downtown New York. CHAPTER 2.

HEAVEN AND HELL IN HARLEM

1. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 2009), 9. 2. Ibid. 3. Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988), 13–14. 4. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 123. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Eighth Avenue also constituted part of the Tenderloin district. 5. Quoted in ibid., 128–130. 6. Carole Marks, Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 13–14. 7. Marks suggests that information about northern opportunities was sent via family and friends in letters, through organizations like the Urban League, and through advertisements in newspapers like the Chicago Defender, which boasted a circulation of 150,000 during the 1910s (ibid., 20–32). 8. Wintz, Black Culture, 20. 9. Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 314. 10. For example, Dewey Jones of the Chicago Defender observed, “[W]hite people think we are buffoons, thugs, and rotters anyway. Why should we waste so much time trying to prove it? That’s what Claude McKay has done.” Qtd. in Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, A Life (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 245. 11. Wayne Cooper, foreword to McKay’s Home to Harlem, xi. 12. Darwin T. Turner, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Theory of a Black Aesthetic,” in Harlem Renaissance Re-examined: A Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Victor A. Kramer and Robert A. Russ (Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing, 1997), 46. 13. Qtd. in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sunquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 310. Originally published in the Crisis in 1921. 14. Reiss contributed two groups of portraits to the Survey Graphic issue: seven portraits, titled Harlem Types, and a shorter series, Four Portraits of Negro Women. The first group starts with a drawing called Congo: A Familiar of the New York Studios and progresses through an increasingly specific group of images: Mother and Child, Young America: Native-Born, A Boy Scout, A Woman Lawyer, Girl in the White Blouse, and A College Lad. A number of scholars have argued that the ordering of the images suggests a subtle movement from African to African American, as the types presented grow increasingly “American” and middle class. By concealing the identities of the individuals, the portraits have the effect of suggesting the universality of the sitters. Similarly, the portraits of women move from the “foreign” (A Woman from the Virgin Islands) to the more specific (Elise Johnson McDougald), with the latter actually naming its subject and

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accompanying her essay, “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation.” The two intervening portraits, one of a librarian and one of two schoolteachers, conforms to the editors’ desire to present representative, middle-class types to the journal’s readership. According to Locke’s text, which accompanied Reiss’s images, “Caricature has put upon the countenance of the Negro the mask of the comic and the grotesque, whereas in deeper truth and comprehension, nature or experience have put there the stamp of the very opposite, the serious, the tragic, the wistful. . . . Here they [Harlem types] are to be seen as we know them to be in fact” (652). 15. The title was changed to The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance for the 1969 reprint and all subsequent editions. 16. Anne Elizabeth Carroll, Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 156. 17. Alain Locke, foreword to The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1992), xvii. 18. The New Negro differed substantially from the journal. Locke expanded the fiction section of the collection, adding short stories, plays, and more poetry to the mix. Second, Reiss’s drawings and portraits were supplemented by work from Aaron Douglas and Miguel Covarrubias. Douglas’s works, along with some of Reiss’s new additions, were more “modern” in design, and drew from Art Deco and primitivist (Africanist) conventions. Reiss’s type studies were reduced and replaced with “a series of portraits of the intellectual and creative leaders of the New Negro movement” (Carroll, Word, Image, and the New Negro, 159), including Locke, Du Bois, and Charles S. Johnson. For more on the visual changes, see Carroll, esp. 156–170. As Caroline Goeser points out, “In Locke’s estimation, Reiss’s work powerfully transformed negative visual associations with dark skin and represented a newly modern vision” of black Americans. But, this newly modern vision was reliant on older pictorial forms—whether the referent is the photographic type studies of nineteenthand early-twentieth-century social scientists or the representations of the “New Negro” by African American artists (Caroline Goeser, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity[Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007], 100). 19. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality in the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 153. 20. Ibid., 154–155. 21. Unattributed quote originally from the Messenger 2 (July 1918) and included in Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: Schocken Books, 1990), 189.Under Du Bois’s editorship, the Crisis published many of the writers associated with the Renaissance before they attained fame. This included Langston Hughes’s first published poem (“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”) in 1921 and Jean Toomer in 1922. 22. Du Bois qtd. in Rampersad, Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, 194. The original appears in “Our Book Shelf,” Crisis 31 (January 1926): 141. 23. Qtd. in Rampersad, Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, 195. 24. Qtd. in Sunquist, Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, 328. The address was given in June 1926 and republished in Crisis 32 (October 1926). 25. Fire!! was published in late 1927. Thurman’s words appeared earlier, in a review of Walter White’s Flight, and published as “A Thrush at Eve with an Atavistic Wound,” in

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the Messenger (May 1926): 154. The editors voiced their views elsewhere as well; for example, in June 1926, Hughes published “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which he argued famously, “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either” (Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature [New York: Norton, 1997], 1271). 26. Everett is unclear on the role of the Talented Tenth in black film criticism during the 1920s. While she acknowledges the differences in opinion among black activists and intellectuals during this time, she says, “despite or perhaps because of these socioeconomic, political, and cultural vicissitudes, the black press maintained its progression of black film literary output” (144–145). The problem is that her discussion aligns the black press with the Talented Tenth simply by virtue of vocation. While it is true that the black press was often made up of middle-class, highly educated individuals, its readership was not. Unlike contributors to the Crisis, Opportunity, and the Messenger, writers for black newspapers in particular were writing for a more popular readership, a fact that determined their coverage. See Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 27. A possible exception to this was R. Bruce Nugent, whose Gentleman Jigger includes a main character (modeled after the author) who appears in a Hollywood musical. The novel, written during the late 1920s and early ’30s, was not published until 2008. 28. For more on Manhatta, see David A. Gerstner, Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 119–164. 29. In 1932, Langston Hughes was among a group of African American intellectuals who traveled to Moscow to work on “Black and White,” a Soviet film project about African American life. The project was never completed, and it was another seven years before Hughes became involved again with film, this time in Hollywood. For more on this, see chapter 3. 30. Everett, Returning the Gaze, 184. Hurston’s article, “Too Much Pampering of White Writers by Negro Leaders: Zora Neale Hurston Raps Harlem’s Literati Who Praise All Nordic Creations on Negroes,” first appeared in the Afro-American in 1930. 31. Everett, Returning the Gaze, 177. 32. Ibid. 33. Lester A. Walton, “Chicago Censor Board Rejects One Large Evening,” New York Age, April 23, 1914, 6. 34. The suggestion that the film was set in Harlem comes from a review by Lester A. Walton that appeared in the New York Age on April 9, 1914. Because prints of neither this film nor Lovie Joe’s Romance exist, we can only speculate on their location and content by referring to reviews. One Large Evening played at the Lafayette Theatre on the week of April 9, and Walton wrote his column after seeing the film. He does not mention the other film in this review. 35. Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995), 178. One Large Evening may not have been helped along by certain marketing practices geared toward different audiences. According to Thomas Cripps, the film was called One Large Evening “in the ghetto and A Night in Coontown in white exhibition houses” (42), a change that was noted by Lester Walton

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in the New York Age in his discussion of the Chicago Censorship Board’s decision not to show the film. See Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 36. Qtd. in Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, 178. Haynes’s appeal appeared in the Indianapolis Freeman on March 14, 1914. 37. Walton, “Chicago Censor Board Rejects One Large Evening,” 6. 38. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, 179. 39. Alison Griffiths and James Latham, “Film and Ethnic Identity in Harlem, 1896–1915,” in American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 54. 40. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, 184. The dates for Jones’s move differ according to sources. Sampson dates the move as sometime between 1915 and 1917. Pearl Bowser, on the other hand, dates it at 1917. See Pearl Bowser, “Pioneers of Black Documentary Film,” in Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, ed. Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 15. It should be noted that Bowser is only concerned with Jones’s nonfiction filmmaking. 41. Whipper was on staff at the Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange, which was founded by the photographers Jennie Louise Toussaint Welcome and Ernest Toussaint Welcome in 1918. Jennie Louise was the sister of James VanDerZee. The Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange produced a serial newsreel, Doing Their Bit (1918), detailing the efforts of blacks in the military. Shadows and Sun was not Jones’s first attempt at fiction film: he had previously made a short comedy, The Slacker, in Chicago. 42. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, 185. 43. From a Micheaux press release, qtd. in Patrick McGilligan, Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 152. 44. This and the longer quote appear in Lester A. Walton, “Sam Langford’s Wallop Makes The Brute a Screen Success,” New York Age, September 18, 1920, 6 (emphasis added). 45. Qtd. in McGilligan, Oscar Micheaux, 129. 46. McGilligan, Oscar Micheaux, 145. 47. Clyde Taylor, “Oscar Micheaux and the Harlem Renaissance,” in Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Genevieve Fabre and Michel Feith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 126. 48. Carlton Moss qtd. in ibid., 132. 49. Taylor, “Oscar Micheaux,” 128–131. 50. Robert Levy, one of the founders of the Lafayette Players, opened Reol Productions in New York. It produced race films such as The Burden of His Race (1921), starring Lawrence Chenault (a Micheaux regular). 51. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, 222. According to Jesse Zunser in “Harlem Goes Hollywood,” the average million-dollar-film had a budget of $12,000, a figure on the high end of an industry with budgets ranging from $3,000 to $20,000 (most on the lower end of this range). Zunser, from Dark Manhattan clippings file, Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Library for the Performing Arts. 52. Paula J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 57. See also Clyde Taylor, “Crossed Over and Can’t Get Black: The Crisis of 1937–39,” Black Film Review 7, n0.4 (1993): 24.

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53. Massood, Black City Cinema, 57. 54. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 168. 55. Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from “Little Caesar” to “Touch of Evil” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 67. 56. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 84. 57. Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes, 4. 58. Massood, Black City Cinema, 61. 59. Micheaux was shooting in New York and New Jersey as early as 1920, when he filmed Symbol of the Unconquered in Fort Lee. According to Richard Kozarski, Micheaux also may have shot some of his 1920s films at the Estee Studio on East 124th Street. Yet, many of Micheaux’s films from this time period, like Symbol, were not specifically set in Harlem. An exception was The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921), which reportedly opened with a shot of the New York skyline. For more on Estee Studio, see Richard Kozarski, Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 508n171. 60. Jonathan Munby, “The Underworld Films of Oscar Micheaux and Ralph Cooper: Toward a Genealogy of the Black Screen Gangster,” in Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film, ed. Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 264–265. 61. The full text of the prologue is as follows: Harlem. With more than a quarter million population is the largest and greatest Negro community in the world. Here intellectuals intermingle with illiterates . . . snobbish society matrons snub their social inferiors . . . The stars of yesterday and today prowl the same pavements. Whites and blacks . . . and all the shadings between . . . live and learn, play and pray side by side in Harlem! Spirituals compete with the St. Louis Blues . . . melodious hymns and maddening hi-de-hos . . . prayers of those convened in churches and profanity of those converted to cabarets . . . roaring subways, rumbling street-cars, rankling milk-wagons and the rat-a-tat of machine guns . . . all part of the throbbing, deafening, crescendo that somehow blends harmoniously into the super-symphony that is HARLEM! To all these . . . because they are part of the most interesting city of modern times . . . HARLEM IS HEAVEN.

62. In 1929, the company reorganized as the Micheaux Film Corporation and registered in New York State. At this point Micheaux worked with white financiers, a shift from his earlier approach to filmmaking (Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, 161). National distribution was handled by the white-owned Sack Amusement Enterprises, the distributors of a number of race films, among other “specialty” titles. 63. Micheaux made other crime films at this time that were either set in or that heavily referenced Chicago, including The Girl from Chicago (1932), which features a section set in New York, and Underworld (1937). Both films also reference the numbers racket. 64. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, 380.

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65. Matthew Bernstein, “Oscar Micheaux and Leo Frank: Cinematic Justice across the Color Line,” Film Quarterly 57, n0.4 (2004): 18. 66. McGilligan, Oscar Micheaux, 218. During the Depression, Micheaux partnered with different white investors, including Frank Schiffman, whose holdings included the Odeon, the Roosevelt, the Douglas, and the Lafayette Theaters (and after 1934, the Apollo). According to McGilligan, the partnership fell apart over money that Micheaux owed Schiffman, and the latter had the director arrested. After an extended court case, Micheaux repaid the debt, but by late 1933 the partnership was over. After this, Micheaux’s films were banned from Schiffman’s theaters (ibid., 271–72). 67. Qtd. in McGilligan, Oscar Micheaux, 282. 68. Munby, “Underworld Films,” 269. 69. Osofsky, Harlem, 184. By the 1930s, the combined effects of the crash and the end of Prohibition resulted in the closure of a number of clubs and other entertainment spots, including Connie’s Inn. Theaters, which had traditionally programmed vaudeville and revue shows along with films switched exclusively to film, thus reducing the venues for live performance. 70. Alain Locke, “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane,” Survey Graphic 25, n0.8 (August 1936): 457. 71. Ibid. 72. Gordon Parks Sr., foreword to Harlem: The Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), ix. Unemployment figures are drawn from Joseph Entin, Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 117. 73. Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: 1900–1950 (New York: Noonday Press, 1981), 243. 74. Locke, “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane,”457 (emphasis added). 75. Qtd. in Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 328. 76. As David E. Ruth suggests, many early gangster films resorted to determinist conclusions to explain a protagonist’s behavior. Such is not the case here. Curly is not punished for his origins. He is punished for not recognizing tradition. David E. Ruth, Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918–1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 77. Ibid., 41–42. 78. Munby, “Underworld Films,” 274. 79. The numbers are the subject of a variety of novels, short stories, poems, and nonfiction works from this time. McKay mentioned them in more than one publication, including Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). In Harlem Glory: A Fragment of Aframerican Life (published posthumously in 1990 but written around the same time as Harlem: Negro Metropolis), he offers a chapter-length description of the history and the structure of numbers. See Harlem Glory: A Fragment of Aframerican Life (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990), esp. 12–15. 80. Massood, Black City Cinema, 64. 81. Qtd. in Ron Chepesiuk, Gangsters of Harlem: The Gritty Underworld of New York’s Most Famous Neighborhood (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2007), 30. Holstein was kidnapped earlier in the decade in a widely publicized case (in both the black and white press), adding to his notoriety. See also Shane White, Stephen Garton, et al., Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 150–160 for more on Holstein.

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82. Qtd. in Munby, “Underworld Films,” 272. 83. Ulmer is possibly best known for the film noir Detour (1946). He is less known for the independent films he made in New York during the 1930s and early ’40s. These films, such as Moon over Harlem and Green Fields (1937), were made for African American and Yiddish-speaking audiences, respectively. He also made two film adaptations of Ukrainian operas. For more on Ulmer, see John Belton, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Edgar G. Ulmer (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1974); and Tag Gallagher, “All Lost in Wonder: Edgar G. Ulmer,” Screening the Past, 12, accessed October 15, 2007, http://www.latrobe .edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0301/tgafr12a.htm. 84. Qtd. in Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, 409. 85. Francis A.J. Ianni, Black Mafia: Ethnic Succession in Organized Crime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 119–120. 86. Massood, Black City Cinema, 68. 87. Dan Burley in the New York Amsterdam News, August 19, 1939. Qtd. in Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, 408. 88. Am I Guilty? was a prestige picture for Supreme Pictures Corporation. Made with a relatively generous budget of $20,000, the film premiered at the Apollo Theater (where many of Cooper’s films premiered) and drew a crowd of “Harlem’s colored elite.” For more, see Zunser, “Harlem Goes Hollywood,” 20. The film included gangsters, but Cooper played an upright character rather than a criminal. 89. Zunser, “Harlem Goes Hollywood,”21. 90. Melissa Rachleff, “Photojournalism in Harlem: Morgan and Marvin Smith and the Construction of Power, 1934–1943,” in Visual Journal: Harlem and D.C. in the Thirties and the Forties, ed. Deborah Willis and Jane Lusaka (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1996), 15–16. 91. Ibid., 15. 92. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, 193. 93. “Brown Bomber Short Filmed by Harlemite,” New York Amsterdam News, November 18, 1932, 8. 94. Ibid. 95. Alfred A. Duckett, “Dark Manhattan Is Gangster Film, but Symbolic of Progress,” New York Age, March 20, 1937, 9 (emphasis added). 96. “Amusements: Builds Market for Negro Pictures,” New York Amsterdam News, September 20, 1941, 21. 97. Bowser, “Pioneers of Black Documentary Film,” 25. 98. “Harlem Broadway Hollywood: 1st Newsreel for Negroes Now Ready,” New York Amsterdam News, October 31, 1942, 16. 99. Miracle in Harlem shows the same concern with uplift that defined African American filmmaking from the silent period through sound. Set in Harlem, the plot focuses on a family-run candy business that is taken over by a big chain store. Once the chain’s owner is murdered, suspicion falls the niece of the original owner of the business. The murderer is eventually found (the owner’s secretary killed him out of greed). Miracle in Harlem is not a gangster film, yet it has similarities with the earlier films, primarily generational differences and the tensions between concern for the community and individual gain. This latter focus conforms with black gangster films from the late1930s, most of which incorporated discourses of uplift and solidarity within more recognizable genre conventions drawn from Hollywood films, suggesting the

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continuing concern among race film producers to not only make a marketable product that could compete with Hollywood, but one that would also represent the race in a positive light. CHAPTER 3.

DELINQUENTS IN THE MAKING

1. Domenic J. Capeci Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977), 101. 2. Qtd. in “195 Hurt, 500 Held in Looting,” New York Post, August 2, 1943. Reprinted in Allon Schoener, ed., Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968 (New York: New Press, 1995), 175. 3. “Harlem Must Share the Blame,” New York Amsterdam News, August 7, 1943. Reprinted in Schoener, Harlem on My Mind, 177–178. 4. According to Capeci, “Low incomes, high rents, overpriced and inferior groceries compelled blacks to live on meager budgets and subjected them to malnutrition. Inferior and discriminatory health facilities contributed to the problem” (Harlem Riot of 1943, 39). 5. The army’s Information and Education Unit employed many Hollywood personnel, including Capra, Connelly, and Ben Hecht. 6. Pearl Bowser, “Pioneers of Black Documentary Film,” in Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, ed. Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 24. Thomas Cripps and David Culbert suggest that John Houseman, who had worked with Moss for the Federal Theater Project, recommended the actor to Capra. Cripps and Culbert, “The Negro Soldier (1944): Film Propaganda in Black and White,” American Quarterly 31, no. 5 (Winter 1979): 623. 7. For more on these changes, see Cripps and Culbert, “The Negro Soldier (1944),” 616–640. 8. James VanDerZee’s public association with the Harlem Renaissance came belatedly, in the late 1960s, when he was rediscovered by a general audience upon the inclusion of his work in the Metropolitan Museum’s controversial “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition in 1969. 9. Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 7–8. 10. Ibid., 7. 11. It is unclear why Smith, who wrote for the Brooklyn Eagle about Harlem and African American affairs, decided to masquerade as a sociologist. Blair quotes Smith as being “hard pressed” to “find reasons for having adopted [the Carter persona] in the first place” (Harlem Crossroads, 20). One possibility, however, is that Smith may have felt that he would be taken more seriously as a social scientist rather than a journalist. 12. “Harlem,” Fortune 20, no. 1 (July 1939): 78. 13. Ibid., 78, 168. 14. Joseph Entin, Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 116. 15. Michael Carter, “244,000 Native Sons,” Look, May 29, 1940, 8. 16. Ibid.

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17. Fortune 20, no. 1 (July 1939): 78. 18. Carter, “244,000 Native Sons,” 8. 19. While not credited in Look, Photo League member Jack Manning took the photograph of the Elks parade. 20. Carter, “244,000 Native Sons,” 10. 21. Ibid. 22. Blair, Harlem Crossroads, 65–66. 23. Entin, Sensational Modernism, 222. 24. For more on the former, see Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992). 25. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Thunder Mouth’s Press, 2002), 35. 26. Richard Avedon and James Baldwin, Nothing Personal (Lucerne, Switzerland: C. J. Bucher, 1964), section 2. The book is unpaginated. 27. Ralph Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” in Shadow and Act (1964; New York: Vintage, 1995), 296. 28. Ibid., 296–300. 29. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Parks returned to the subject of black urban life in a series of documentaries he directed for public television, including Diary of a Harlem Family (1962), thus beginning a career in moving images that culminated in Shaft (1971), one of the films credited with starting the blaxploitation boom. 30. While Hughes’s friendship with Cartier-Bresson did not result in any collaborations, it inspired Hughes to write a unpublished essay on the documentary photograph (Blair, Harlem Crossroads, 53). In the late 1930s, Hughes collaborated with Griffin J. Davis, a photographer for Ebony, on a number of short pieces about Harlem life. He returned to the genre in 1950, when he approached photographer Marion Palti about another project on Harlem (which never materialized). 31. Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955; Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1984), 9 (emphasis mine). 32. Faith Berry, Langston Hughes, before and beyond Harlem (1983;New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 305. 33. Langston Hughes, “Is Hollywood Fair to Negroes?,” in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs, ed. Christopher C. De Santi (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 226–227. The essay originally appeared in Negro Digest 1, no. 6 (April 1943): 19–21. 34. Ibid., 228. 35. John Pyros, “Richard Wright: A Black Novelist’s Experience in Film,” Black American Literature Forum 9, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 53. 36. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 336. European interest in the story ranged from Roberto Rossellini in Italy and Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert in France. Fabre offers a detailed discussion of the circumstances surrounding the adaptation, filming, and exhibition of Native Son (1951). 37. One was a project focusing on Haiti, which was inspired by the author’s trip to the island after filming Native Son, and the other was a story about the passengers on a train in the American zone in Germany.

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38. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Dell Publishing, 1976), 10. 39. Ibid., 69. 40. Ibid., 115–117. 41. Brian Norman, “Reading a ‘Closet Screenplay’: Hollywood, James Baldwin’s Malcolms and the Threat of Historical Irrelevance,” African American Review 39, nos. 1–2 (2005): 104. While the screenplay was never made into a film, Perl went on to direct the documentary, Malcolm X, in 1972. Baldwin was not included in the project, which did credit the Haley text. 42. Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 120. 43. Norman, “Reading a ‘Closet Screenplay,’ ” 108. 44. Ellison, “The Shadow and the Act,” in Shadow and Act (1964; New York: Vintage, 1995),275. 45. Ibid., 276–277. 46. Blair, Harlem Crossroads, 7. 47. Qtd. in ibid., 71. 48. By this time, Agee had shifted from photojournalism to film criticism, first for Time and the Nation and then, in 1948, for Life. Yet his roots, like Levitt’s, were in the documentary movement from the previous decade. 49. Juan Antonio Suárez Sánchez, “Avant-Garde Cinema and Cultural Negotiation: Documentary Expression, Surrealism and Cold War Politics in James Agee and Helen Levitt’s In the Street,” Atlantis 18, nos. 1–2 (1996): 398. 50. Loeb also funded the film and received a producing credit. William Levitt, Helen’s brother, was an associate producer on the project. 51. The Wiltwyck School for Boys was founded in 1936 by the Episcopalian Mission Society, as a school for troubled African American boys between the ages of eight and twelve. In 1942, after almost closing, it became a nonsectarian institution, which accepted boys of all ages. It was largely run on donations and was one of the favorite charities of Eleanor Roosevelt. The school remained open until 1981, when it closed because of a lack of funding. Its former students include Claude Brown, author of Manchild in a Promised Land (1965). 52. Vinicius de Moraes, “The Making of a Document: ‘The Quiet One,’ ” Hollywood Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Summer 1950):377. 53. Ellison, “The Shadow and the Act,” 295–296. 54. Gordon Parks, “Harlem Gang Leader,” Life, November 1, 1948, 96–106. 55. Gordon Parks, Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 102. 56. Ibid., 103. 57. Ibid. 58. Parks, “Harlem Gang Leader,” 97. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 106. 62. Ibid., 104.

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63. The term “marketable shock” is used by Blair to describe post-Renaissance “representational practices and conventions” that “sought to explore [Harlem’s] everyday life” (Harlem Crossroads, 8). 64. The Éclair Cameflex, for example, was a lightweight (shoulder-held) camera that was introduced to the market in 1947. In 1963, the company released the Éclair NPR, a small 16mm camera that enabled documentary filmmakers to shoot on the fly. In the early 1960s, Nagra introduced a portable sound recorder that enabled filmmakers to record direct sound. 65. Unlike race films, The Cool World was not intended for African American audiences in particular. Instead, its experimental aesthetics and pedigree guaranteed a run that started at the Venice Film Festival and extended to art houses (not the milieu of most black viewers at this time). Furthermore, the film is also a development outside of the “message movie” cycle, a group of studio-made films produced after World War II that focused on social problems like racism, drug and alcohol abuse, and sexual deviancy. 66. Miller was also responsible for ghostwriting Return to Peyton Place, a sequel to Grace Metalious’s popular Peyton Place. See Emily Togh, Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 219–220. 67. In the novel, Duke sells marijuana and his sexual services to white men to raise the cash; in the film, he sells drugs and steals. It is unclear why Clarke and Lee chose to change this element of the story. 68. According to Christopher Sieving, Himes was commissioned to write a screenplay about Harlem by a pair of European producers. The project, “Baby Sister,” was not completed because the film’s focus, a troubled seventeen-year-old girl in Harlem, was too controversial to find funding in the United States. Additionally, the project faced opposition from the NAACP, who did not want it to be shot in Harlem. Christopher Sieving, Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema from the March on Washington to the Rise of Blaxploitation (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 45–46. 69. Ibid., 48. 70. James Baldwin, “War Lord of the Crocadiles,” review of The Cool World, by Warren Miller, New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1959, 4. 71. Warren Miller, The Cool World (New York: Little, Brown, 1959), 22–23. 72. In 1958, Clarke, Van Dyke, Leacock, Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles formed Filmmakers, Inc., a cooperative designed to give emerging filmmakers office space, equipment, and postproduction support. Eventually, other filmmakers became associated with the cooperative, including Frederick Wiseman and Joyce Chopra. See Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema 1943–1971 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 110. 73. After the State Department rejected the film, Clarke released it independently to great acclaim. There were two scores commissioned for the film, Barrons’s and another by Teo Macero. The latter was commissioned when Clarke was unsure of whether she could secure the distribution rights for the Barron score. The film, originally three and a half minutes, now circulates as a seven-minute print with both scores (Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance, 102). 74. Both quotations are taken from David E. James’s introduction to To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David E. James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 9–10. Eventually, Mekas and others in the group formed the Film-Maker’s Cooperative, a distribution network as well as a space where filmmakers

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could work on their films. Clarke also cofounded, along with Rogosin and Mekas, the Film-Makers Distribution Center in 1966. The center eventually went out of business, and Mekas went on to establish the Anthology Film Archives in 1970. 75. Clarke also met John Cassavetes through the auspices of Filmmakers, Inc., and lent Cassavetes her equipment for Shadows (1958), a film that can be viewed as a stylistic and thematic precursor to Clarke’s later feature films (Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance, 110). 76. Wiseman’s investment in The Connection is mentioned in Barry Keith Grant’s Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 198. Gelber’s The Connection was staged by the experimental theater troupe, The Living Theater, in 1959. In 1964, Jonas Mekas filmed the troupe’s performance of The Brig, Kenneth H. Brown’s depiction of life in a Marine Corps jail. 77. Wiseman qtd. in Donald E. McWilliams, “Frederick Wiseman,” Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1970): 19. 78. Harriet R. Polt, “The Cool World,” Film Quarterly 17, no. 2 (Winter 1963–1964): 34. 79. Sieving, Soul Searching, 51. 80. For more on the film’s links to the gangster genre, see Barry Keith Grant, “When Worlds Collide: The Cool World,” Literature/Film Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1990): 179–187. In particular, Grant links Priest’s appearance to the iconic look of the gangster (183). 81. Duke’s desire for a gun is one example of such myopia; he wants the Colt because it will make him an important presence in the gang and will help him beat down members of a rival gang. And Priest, perhaps the only remnant of the older black gangster, offers the community only death and violence through his drug dealing and sale of guns. His indebtedness to downtown organized crime, furthermore, links him to powers that work against the neighborhood. 82. Miller, The Cool World, 148. 83. While Van Peebles’s film is considered by most film scholars as the prototype for blaxploitation, it was also much more experimental than the films it influenced. Its synchronous sound, montage editing, jump cuts, and open ending was selfconsciously constructed to confront audiences, just as much as was its narrative about a cop-killing sex worker turned revolutionary. 84. Clarke used an abandoned tenement for interiors, and all furniture and props came from the building. 85. Sieving, Soul Searching, 57. 86. Albert Johnson, “The Negro in American Films: Some Recent Works,” Film Quarterly 18, no. 4 (Summer 1965): 26. 87. Ibid., 23. 88. Polt, “The Cool World,” 34. 89. The San Francisco Film Festival screened Melvin Van Peebles’s first film, La permission/ The Story of a Three-Day Pass in 1968, a screening that brought the director to the attention of the executives at Columbia Pictures. Shortly afterward, Van Peebles directed Watermelon Man (1970) for Columbia. He then used some of the proceeds from the film to finance Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971. Van Peebles managed to avoid the art cinema label, even though La permission and Sweetback are highly reflexive and experimental films. After The Cool World, Clarke was also summoned to Hollywood, but she never made a film and soon returned to New York.

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90. Johnson, “The Negro in American Films,” 26–28. 91. James De Jongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 211. CHAPTER 4.

GANGSTER’S PARADISE

1. Harlem’s unrest spread to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a move that not only indicated the shifts of the city’s African American population, but also suggested that race relations were tense throughout the city during this time. 2. In a change from earlier news coverage of urban violence, during 1964, many major news outlets, such as the New York Times, the Associated Press, and United Press International, dispatched African American reporters to the scene, where they worked alongside their white counterparts. Reporters included Junius Griffin, Austin Scott, and Earl Caldwell. For more on this, see the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education website, accessed January 26, 2010, http://www.mije.org/ historyproject/Caldwell_journals/chapter9. 3. The events in 1964 were foreshadowed in a number of “special reports” on the neighborhood that aired on national television months prior to the riot. Examples include CBS’s “The Harlem Temper,” which aired in December 1963 and detailed the neighborhood’s alarming economic conditions, and “Why Harlem Is Angry,” an article in the New York Times Magazine, published July 14, 1963. 4. Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 231. 5. In 1964, Killens also formed, with Malcolm X and John Henrik Clarke, the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU), in an attempt to strengthen the ties between African Americans and Africans and to support political causes in the United States. The organization ceased operations shortly after Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965. Killens also cowrote the screenplay for Herbert J. Biberman’s Slaves (1969), a story of a slave revolt during the antebellum period. Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten, had been blacklisted from the industry for years. Slaves was his first film in fifteen years, and the last film he directed. The cast of the film includes Ossie Davis, Dionne Warwick, and Julius Harris, among others. 6. John O. Killens, prologue to Harlem Stirs (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1966), 7. 7. James Baldwin and Richard Avedon’s Nothing Personal is an exception here, perhaps because it was published the same year as Harlem Stirs. For more on the BaldwinAvedon collaboration, see chapter 3. 8. Reported box office earnings for the film vary from $5 million to $15 million, depending on the source. For more on Sweetback, see Ed Guerrero’s Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); Mark Reid’s Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Paula J. Massood’s Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); and idem, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” in Fifty Key American Films, ed. John White and Sabine Haenni (London: Routledge, 2009), 152–158. 9. Massood, Black City Cinema, 86–87. 10. For more on American International Pictures, see David Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff formed AIP (initially

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American Releasing Corporation) in 1954 as a “releasing company for low-budget exploitation films in all genres.” AIP worked with a number of independent producers, including Roger Corman, along with producing its own films (ibid., 323–324). The company distributed films in a number of markets, establishing, very early in its history, a method of targeting and exploiting particular audience sectors. In fact, by the 1960s, it was the “paradigmatic teenage exploitation studio” (ibid., 324), distributing films such as Beach Party (William Asher, 1963) and Bikini Beach (William Asher, 1964). 11. Ibid., 323. 12. Nicholson and Arkoff were to blaxploitation what Jack and Bert Goldberg and Harry M. and Leo Popkin were to race film during the 1930s: white businessmen who profited by making films for an underserved segment of the film market. Like many of the gangster films from decades before, blaxploitation films were often viewed as black variants of white formulas, with, perhaps, Black Caesar proving the most obvious example of the conventions of the genre adapted for an African American context. 13. Massood, Black City Cinema, 84. 14. Williamson played for the Oakland Raiders and the Kansas City Chiefs prior to moving into acting in the 1960s. After appearing in a number of television shows, he made his film debut in M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970). Cohen took advantage of Williamson’s status as a recognizable star by allowing bystanders to surround the actor while filming was underway. The effect is to suggest that Tommy is a figure of reverence for some people in the community (though not the gang members who attack him at the film’s conclusion). 15. Black Caesar contains an even more explicit reference to the Coppola film when, in an early scene, Tommy walks by a theater advertising The Godfather. The film also drew upon the earlier film’s massive success in its marketing tagline: “Godfather of Harlem!” 16. Killens, Harlem Stirs, 5. 17. Larry Cohen, interview by Bryan Layne, Films in Review, December 21, 2009, accessed January 6 2010, http://www.filmsinreview.com/2009/12/21/larry-cohen-interview. 18. Tony Williams, Larry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 1997), 111–112. 19. Not only did the new ending enable audiences to imagine the possibility of their hero’s survival (and the resuscitation of a reputation bruised by a beating at the hands of kids), but it allowed AIP to capitalize on the film’s success through the production of a sequel, Hell Up in Harlem (Larry Cohen, 1973), which features a newly conscious Tommy seeking revenge on everyone involved in his downfall. The original ending was shown only in European theaters before it was put back into the film when it was released on video. 20. Television briefly eclipsed film in the production of African American content during the 1970s and ’80s. For more on this, see Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 21. The film was first shown on PBS and then screened at a number of film festivals. It was awarded the Grand Prize for Documentaries at the 1983 Sundance Film Festival and was screened at the Chicago and Vancouver film festivals as well.

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22. All box office figures are taken from IMDb.com, accessed July 10, 2010, http://www.imdb.com. The figure for the number of screens (762) seems high, and there is no indication of how many screens the film opened on (the 762 number is listed as two weeks after the film opened). Still, the film opened with a box office of more than $5 million dollars, which suggests generous coverage in theaters. 23. Collaborations between film studios and record companies were a growing trend at the time. For example, Saturday Night Fever (1977) was produced by the Robert Stigwood Organization as a showcase for some of its stars, including the Bee Gees. The Wiz (1978) was a coproduction between Universal Pictures and Motown Productions, and Grease (1978) brought together Paramount Pictures and the Robert Stigwood Organization. 24. As McHenry remembers, “That little film sold a lot of records.” Qtd. in “Doug McHenry,” Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk about the Magic of Cinema, ed. George Alexander (New York: Harlem Moon, 2003), 174. 25. Brooklyn was home to African American settlements as early as the 1830s, when James Weeks acquired land in Bedford-Stuyvesant and established the community of Weeksville, which eventually became home to a large population of middle-class blacks. Bedford-Stuyvesant continued to be an African American neighborhood throughout the twentieth century, and census figures for 1980 indicate that 98 percent of the section’s population consisted of black Americans. Sydney Beveridge, “Demographics and Do the Right Thing: A Look at Bedford Stuyvesant,” Social Explorer, September 1, 2009, accessed July 11, 2010, http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/blog/?p=73. In 2000, Brooklyn’s African American population (at 36 percent of the borough’s residents) was the largest of the city’s five boroughs. 26. Qtd. in Janice Mosier Richolson, “He’s Gotta Have It: An Interview with Spike Lee,” in Spike Lee: Interviews, ed. Cynthia Fuchs (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002), 28. Originally published in Cineaste 18, no. 4 (1991): 12–14. 27. Miscegenation presumes an act of trespass or a crossing of forbidden boundaries, which, when the term was coined in 1864, referred to the boundaries of race via the sex act and possible procreation (the term appeared in an anonymously written antiRepublican pamphlet seeking to influence the 1864 election by inciting race fear among white men). Over time, the term has morphed from its biological beginnings (based on a pseudoscientific neologism) to more metaphoric meanings, which retain their roots in the taboo mixing of different races, but which resonate also across class and geography. Miscegenation, particularly in a segregated context, can refer to crossing spatial as well as racial boundaries; from glances directed in the wrong direction (“reckless eyeballing”); speaking to the wrong person (Emmett Till’s fate); or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time (Yusef Hawkins among thousands of others). In short, miscegenation is always already a spatial transgression of some sort. For more on the concept of miscegenation, see David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (New York, 1863–1864); and Elise Virginia Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). For more on the cinematic “fascination” with the mixing of the races, see Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 28. Hawkins’s ghost haunts the film, starting with his image at the beginning and sustained by multiple narrative and symbolic references to his murder made by Jungle

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Fever’s Italian American characters. In one of the more obvious references, one of the characters wears a shirt with “Free Fama” emblazoned across its front. The text refers to Joseph Fama, the man accused of firing the shots that killed Hawkins. Fama was found guilty of second-degree murder in 1990. 29. It also suggests Brooklyn’s diversity of neighborhoods. Unlike Harlem, which signifies African American culture (with the exception of East Harlem, a predominantly Latino neighborhood), Brooklyn’s meanings change, depending on neighborhood; for example, Bedford-Stuyvesant is traditionally African American, Crown Heights is West Indian and Hasidic, Brighton Beach is Russian, Greenpoint is Polish. Of course, the demographic makeup of each neighborhood has changed in the past two decades as the Manhattan and Brooklyn real estate markets have pushed more affluent, and less ethnically identified (i.e., white), people into the “outer” boroughs. 30. See Paula Deitz, “In Harlem’s Elegant Striver’s Row,” New York Times, April 16, 1981, accessed September 28, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/16/garden/in-harlem-selegant-strivers-row.html. Also see Craig Unger, “Can Harlem Be Born Again?” New York, November 19, 1988, 28–36. 31. P.S. 129 serves a problematic rhetorical purpose in the film. The fact that Flipper and Drew send their child to a local public school suggests their support of community institutions as well as their progressive politics. Until recently, P.S. 129 (known as the John H. Finley School) was on New York City’s list of failing schools. It is unlikely that an educated couple with the financial means would send their child to such an institution at this time in New York’s history. 32. Unlike exterior shots of Flipper’s or his parents’ buildings, the Taj Mahal has no establishing shot. This is most likely because buildings actually exist on each of the corners of this site, including the Convent Avenue Baptist Church. As Lee’s disdain for religious zeal is well known, the location of the Taj Mahal might be a notso-subtle critique of the church’s inability to stem the tide of criminality and drug addiction in the neighborhood, despite street-corner preachers like the one who opens the scene. 33. Roger Ebert, review of Jungle Fever, by Spike Lee, Chicago Sun-Times, June 7, 1991, accessed July 15, 2010, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/ 19910607/REVIEWS/106070305. See also Michelle Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 215–222; and Ed Guerrero, “Spike Lee and the Fever in the Racial Jungle,” in The Spike Lee Reader, ed. Paula J. Massood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 77–90. 34. See Massood, Black City Cinema, for the former, and S. Craig Watkins, “Ghetto Reelness: Hollywood Film Production, Black Popular Culture and the Ghetto Action Film Cycle,” in Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, ed. Steve Neale (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), 236–250, for the latter. 35. For more on this, see Todd Boyd, Am I Black Enough for You? Popular Culture from the ’Hood and Beyond (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Additionally, in Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008), Ken Tucker argues that the phrase “hip hop gangsta” was used as early as 1985 by LL Cool J on his album Radio (120). 36. Between 1970 and 1989, for example, the population of Central Harlem decreased from 160,000 to 97,000. Some of this was the result of an overall drop in New York City’s population during this time; however, the fall in Harlem’s numbers was also

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due to the lack of suitable housing and other social and economic conditions in the neighborhood. For more on this, see Leith Mullings, “After Drugs and the ‘War on Drugs’: Reclaiming the Power to Make History in Harlem, NY,” in Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, ed. Jane Schneider and Ida Susser (New York: Berg, 2003), 178. 37. In its focus on four young men from Harlem, Juice is a continuation of the narratives of juvenile delinquency and environmental determinism that were discussed in chapter 3. Yet, its use of many of the conventions of the hood genre takes it in a different direction from the aim of the present chapter, which is to consider the interactions of history and the gangster genre in films set in Harlem. 38. Qtd. in George Alexander, Why We Make Movies, 174. 39. Ibid., 175. 40. Ibid., 174. 41. All quotations from Cooper’s article are drawn from Barry Michael Cooper, “Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young,” Village Voice, December 1, 1987, accessed August 17, 2010, http://hookedontheamericandream.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-jackcity-eats-its-young-original.html. 42. Mullings, “After Drugs and the ‘War on Drugs,’ ” 177–178. 43. Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from “Little Caesar” to “Touch of Evil” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 73. 44. Qtd. in Alexander, Why We Make Movies, 174. 45. Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” in Gangster Film Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 2007), 13. 46. There’s no clear reason for Sweetback’s presence in the scene except that it was directed by Melvin Van Peebles, Mario’s father. Mario may have been attempting to create links between Nino and Sweetback, but they remain unclear, especially considering that the film does not claim any hero or revolutionary status for Nino. In fact, if anything, the replacement of Scarface with Sweetback confuses the scene’s meaning rather than solidifying any commentary on the status of African American outlaws or black masculinity. 47. Boyd, Am I Black Enough for You?, 86–87. 48. Qtd. in Tucker, Scarface Nation, 104.

CHAPTER 5.

ECHOES OF A RENAISSANCE

1. Cheryl Finley, “Harlem Sites of Memory,” in Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2003), 51. 2. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7. 3. Ibid., 13. 4. Emil Wilbekin, the magazine’s editor in chief, stylized the feature and wrote its accompanying text. While Finley discusses Couple in Raccoon Coats as though it was part of the final spread, a slightly different image appears in Vibe. The differences between the two shots are minor—the figures are reversed and the make of the car is more clearly visible in the magazine version—but the reference to Harlem of the 1920s and ’30s remains clear.

NOTES TO PAGES 162–166

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5. According to Paul Tough, Harlem’s 2002 poverty rate was 26 percent (Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2009], 38). 6. Thelma Golden, “Of Harlem: An Introduction,” in Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2003), 10. 7. The controversy around the Metropolitan Museum’s “Harlem on My Mind” show— and its focus on history rather than art—was the impetus behind the establishment of the Studio Museum in Harlem. For more on the show, see Bridget R. Cooks, “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969),” American Studies 48, n0.1 (Spring 2007): 5–39. 8. Emil Wilbekin, “Harlem Renaissance: Vintage Uptown Cool,” Vibe, September 2002, 223 (emphasis added). 9. Golden, “Of Harlem,” 11. 10. Mabel O. Wilson, “Black in Harlem: Architects, Racism, and the City,” in Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2003), 36. 11. Wilson acknowledges that her observation is not new and traces the links between architecture and film back to Walter Benjamin. 12. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 8. 13. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984) falls into this category as well; however, because African American characters are not the main focus of the film, it is not included in the present discussion. 14. Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), 86. 15. Ibid., 79–80. 16. Ibid., 81 (emphasis added). 17. Worth owned the rights to the story from the beginning. Once the Baldwin-Perl project was shelved, Worth produced a feature-length documentary, Malcolm X (1972), written and directed by Perl, which drew most of its content from the Autobiography. Both the documentary and the later fiction film were produced by Warner Bros., which had taken over the failed Baldwin-Perl project. 18. Spike Lee with Ralph Wiley, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of “Malcolm X” (New York: Hyperion, 1992), 2. 19. Bernard Weinraub, “A Movie Producer Remembers the Human Side of Malcolm X,” New York Times, November 23, 1992, C11. The final screenplay was credited to Perl and Lee once Baldwin’s estate requested that his name be removed after Lee’s revisions significantly reworked the sections detailing Malcolm’s break with the NOI. In By Any Means Necessary, Lee states, “James Baldwin knew Malcolm X; they were acquaintances— even good friends, I’ve come to believe. Also, I don’t think there has ever been a writer to better capture Harlem and its people better than Jimmy Baldwin. Baldwin was brought up in Harlem, he was an African-American, a human rights advocate, and a great writer. So he had all the ingredients. The only place the script was lacking was in the last act, where we should clearly see defined the split between Malcolm and Elijah” (27). 20. Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 84. 21. Ibid., 82.

NOTES TO PAGES 167–173

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22. This scene fictionalizes a moment in the Autobiography, during which Malcolm remembers that “every time Joe Louis won a fight against a white opponent, big front-page pictures in the Negro newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Afro-American showed a sea of Harlem Negroes cheering and waving and the Brown Bomber waving back at them from the balcony of Harlem’s Theresa Hotel” (Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 80). 23. Ibid., 84. 24. Ibid., 86. 25. Ibid., 93. 26. Ibid., 96. 27. Anna Everett, “ ‘Spike, Don’t Mess Malcolm Up’: Courting Controversy and Control in Malcolm X,” in The Spike Lee Reader, ed. Paula J. Massood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 103. 28. Nell Irvin Painter, “Malcolm X across the Genres,” American Historical Review 98, n0.2 (April 1993): 433. 29. Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 98. 30. Ibid., 128 (original emphasis). In By Any Means Necessary, Lee mistakenly refers to West Indian Archie as “Malcolm’s numbers-running mentor in the streets of Harlem” (93), a claim not substantiated by the Autobiography. In fact, Malcolm never worked for West Indian Archie. 31. Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 139. 32. Everett, “ ‘Spike, Don’t Mess Malcolm Up,’ ” 102. 33. Ibid., 103. 34. For more on The Godfather, see Nick Browne, ed., Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” Trilogy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also Timothy O’Leary, “Godfathers and Sons: Tripping over the Unconscious,” Film-Philosophy 13, n0.1 (April 2009): 38–52. 35. Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 110. 36. The section’s combination of gangster and musical components links it formally to the black gangster films of the 1930s and ’40s, many of which included musical numbers for added audience appeal. 37. Significantly, this scene ends with a cut, following Shorty’s line, “You used to be a big shot.” The next shot is a flashback to Malcolm’s father’s murder, a shot similar to the one in which Malcolm flees West Indian Archie. 38. Everett, “ ‘Spike, Don’t Mess Malcolm Up,’ ” 104. 39. Painter argues that the use of newsreel footage—and the film is filled with similar examples—“wraps [Malcolm X] in manufactured images of documentary truth” that is furthered, as well, by cameos of actual individuals such as Al Sharpton (“Malcolm X across the Genres,”434). 40. For example, the amount of money it would take to shoot in the Audubon Ballroom was prohibitive, so another location was used for interiors. The actual Audubon only appears in exteriors. 41. Painter, “Malcolm X across the Genres,” 434. 42. Everett, “ ‘Spike, Don’t Mess Malcolm Up,’ ” 102. 43. This is not to imply that white organized crime did not have a hold over Harlem. In fact, white mobsters controlled many of Harlem’s cabarets, like the Cotton Club, and

NOTES TO PAGES 173–175

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speakeasies, particularly during Prohibition. The numbers was one of the few areas that did not interest the Mob, particularly because it seemed disparate in its organization. Schultz’s attempt to control the Harlem numbers was the second such attempt by whites to move into the area. The first came in the 1920s, when Hyman Kassell, Mo Immerman, and a number of Jewish bootleggers tried to take over the numbers by opening up storefront operations in the area. The struggle for Harlem’s numbers lasted a few years, but eventually failed because of strong resistance in the community. Harlem’s residents did not want to bet the numbers with white bankers because the business was one of the few open to African American operators in the neighborhood. See Shane White et al., Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 103–111. For more on Hyman Kassell, see Rufus Schatzberg and Robert J. Kelly, African-American Organized Crime: A Social History (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 90. 44. Schatzberg and Kelly, African-American Organized Crime, 93. Schultz moved the numbers into storefront operations rather than employ runners who would move from building to building to record bets. The runners were African American while whites owned and operated the storefront businesses. 45. In the film Schultz’s death clears the way for Johnson to control the numbers in Harlem. In truth, however, control was passed to the Mafia, and the numbers in Harlem remained the purview of white organized crime through the 1940s if not beyond. 46. The film often takes liberties with historical facts; for example, Francine is shown doing work for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. By 1934 (the film’s setting), however, the UNIA was no longer a force in Harlem, Garvey having been tried and imprisoned for mail fraud in 1923 (he began serving his sentence in 1925). In 1927, his sentence was commuted and he was deported to Jamaica, where he stayed until he moved to London in 1935. He died in London in 1940. 47. Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” in The Gangster Film Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 2007), 14. This exchange is based on one that appears in Helen Lawrenson, Stranger at the Party: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1975), 180. Lawrenson, a white editor for Vanity Fair, was Johnson’s lover during the mid-1930s. 48. The casting of Laurence Fishburne as Bumpy Johnson further legitimizes the gangster’s hero status within the film. At this time, Fishburne was best known for his performance as Furious Styles, the father with outspoken nationalist politics in John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood. 49. Ron Chepesiuk, Gangsters of Harlem: The Gritty Underworld of New York’s Most Famous Neighborhood (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2007), 92–95. The fact that Johnson’s poetry was published in this journal again suggests the links between Harlem’s criminal underworld and its elites, like Holstein’s involvement with Opportunity magazine decades earlier. Freedomways was edited by Louis Burnham and Edward Strong, with the support of W.E.B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois. 50. Chepesiuk, Gangsters of Harlem, 94–95. 51. The dates are unclear here; however, Schatzberg and Kelly suggest that Johnson worked for the Cosa Nostra from 1940 until his death in 1968 (African-American Organized Crime, 109), dates similar to those cited by William Kleinknecht in The New Ethnic Mobs: The Changing Face of Organized Crime in America (New York: Free Press, 1996).

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52. Qtd. in Chepesiuk, Gangsters of Harlem, 99. 53. Unidentified quote from Paul Lee, “Gangster-Nationalist,” Michigan Citizen, November 12, 2007, accessed September 12, 2010, http://michigancitizen.com/gangsternationalistp5228–106.htm. 54. “Production Notes,” Hoodlum, directed by Bill Duke (Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 1998), DVD. 55. Mark Jacobson, “The Return of Superfly,” New York, August 7, 2007, accessed November 4, 2007, http://nymag.com/nymag/features/3649. 56. American Gangster fictionalized the circumstances of Johnson’s death. He died on June 7, 1968, of a heart attack while seated in a Harlem restaurant, not in an electronics store. The speech against chain stores is actually from the Jacobson article, and is voiced by Lucas, not Johnson. 57. This may not be such a shift from reality, as “much of what the authorities learned about Super Fly’s role in the drug trade came through the gangster’s lips,” according to Chepesiuk (Gangsters of Harlem, 159). 58. American Gangster grossed $265 million worldwide. New Jack City, made for an estimated $8.5 million dollars, grossed $47 million dollars worldwide, a respectable profit considering that the film opened on 862 screens (American Gangster opened on 3,052 screens). Box office figures are drawn from IMDb.com and Box Office Mojo, both accessed July 7, 2011. 59. The film’s marketing campaign presented it as a gangster film by using posters featuring Washington’s face and profile. 60. Qtd. in Jacobson, “The Return of Superfly.” 61. It is unclear whether Lucas actually set up the network on his own, as suggested in the film, or if he worked with Leslie “Ike” Atkinson (Nate in the film), a distant cousin and military man who was based in Bangkok, Thailand. Both men take credit for the connection, and both men ultimately served prison time (Atkinson’s prison sentence was directly related to a shipment that came to the United States from abroad). 62. This scene and the suggestion that Lucas takes Huey shopping for more appropriate attire may have been based on one of Lucas’s recollections of his early interactions with Bumpy: “First we stopped at a clothing store—he picked out a bunch of stuff for me. Suits, ties, slacks. Nice stuff.” There are a number of suggestions in the film (and the Jacobson piece) that Lucas was a father figure to his younger brothers. In a similar way, Bumpy was a father figure for Lucas. The focus on proper appearance is a recurring theme in black gangster films, from Dark Manhattan through the early Harlem scenes in Malcolm X. 63. Chepesiuk, Gangsters of Harlem, 161–162. 64. Ibid., 113–114. 65. It is rumored that the article convinced President Jimmy Carter to order a federal crackdown on narcotics (Jacobson, “The Return of Superfly”). 66. Of the threesome, Barnes handed out turkeys and toys during the holidays. According to a former special agent in charge of the New York Division of the Drug Enforcement Agency and quoted in Chepesiuk, “Law enforcement knew him [Barnes] as a ruthless gangster who sold drugs, destroyed young people, and deferred dreams. A lot of people saw him as kind of a Robin Hood who gave out turkeys to the poor” (Gangsters of Harlem, 125–126).

NOTES TO PAGES 185–190

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67. All the quotations in this and the following two paragraphs are from Jacobson, “The Return of Superfly.” 68. Where Lucas asks, “What was wrong with just plain Eighth Avenue?” According to Monique M. Taylor, such an attitude is common among Harlem’s older residents, who are torn between honoring Harlem’s place in African American history and honoring its place in American history. A similar tension occurs, according to Taylor, regarding the renaming of Mount Morris Park to Marcus Garvey Park (Harlem: Between Heaven and Hell [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002], 42–45). 69. Scott seems to favor Thailand over New York. While the overseas scenes offer some detail about Lucas’s business arrangements in Southeast Asia, they could have been filmed anywhere. Instead, a chunk of the film’s budget was spent on moving cast and crew to film on location. 70. For more on the gentrification of Harlem during the 1980s, see Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996), 140–164. 71. Timothy Williams, “Harlem Journal: Mixed Feelings as Change Overtakes 125th Street,” New York Times, June 13, 2008, accessed April 10, 2009, http://www.nytimes .com/2008/06/13/nyregion/13journal.html. 72. Timothy Williams, “A Notorious Harlem Shooting Gallery Goes Condo,” New York Times, February 21, 2008, accessed April 10, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/ 02/21/.html. 73. There’s no indication that Lucas owned property in Harlem, despite the fact that he had real estate interests elsewhere, including Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Puerto Rico (Jacobson, “The Return of Superfly”). In the film, Lucas refers to properties, but their location remains unspecified. 74. Sam Roberts, “No Longer Majority Black, Harlem Is in Transition,” New York Times, January 6, 2010, accessed January 6, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/nyregion/ 06harlem.html. 75. Timothy Williams, “Shedding Newcomers’ Stigma in an Evolving Harlem,” New York Times, September 7, 2008, 38. 76. Ibid., 33. 77. Ibid. 78. In a recent Politico piece, Ben Smith suggests that Brooklyn is quickly becoming the new center of African American political power in New York City as Harlem’s power brokers have become less relevant as a result of age or political mishaps. According to Smith, “Within New York, African-American political power has quietly shifted across the East River to Brooklyn’s nearly one million black residents, whose boosters say have done what Harlem didn’t: produce an independent new generation of political leaders” (“Sun Setting on Harlem,” Politico, March 7, 2010, accessed March 7, 2010, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34018.html). 79. Jacobson, “The Return of Superfly.”Lucas repeats this memory in an episode of the television series American Gangster. Indeed, much of the episode repeats the history covered in the Jacobson piece. 80. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 21–48. 81. According to Rivka Gewirtz Little, the “Harlem USA” development was partially funded by the Abyssinian Development Corporation, the development arm of the

NOTES TO PAGES 190–196

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Abyssinian Baptist Church, in a location that had initially been earmarked (in the early 1980s) for the construction of the Harlem International Trade Center (Rivka Gewirtz Little, “The New Harlem,” Village Voice, September 17, 2002, accessed March 15, 2010, http://www.villagevoice.com/2002–09–17/news/the-new-harlem). 82. The “Harlem USA” retail complex is owned and operated by Gotham Organization, a privately financed development company. Its Harlem holding property is described on its website, http://www.gothamorganization.com/portfolio/commercial. 83. Golden, “Of Harlem,” 11. 84. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Disappearing Acts: Capturing Harlem in Transition,” in Harlem on the Verge, by Alice Attie (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003), 13.

CONCLUSION.

MAKING AND REMAKING A PROMISED LAND

1. Attie’s work was included in the Studio Museum’s “Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor” exhibition discussed in the previous chapter. Alice Attie, Adler Guerrier, and Kira Lynn Harris were chosen by curator Thelma Golden as examples of photographers whose “individual visions capture a sense of Harlem’s present.” Ironically, the photographs included in Harlem on the Verge represent the only time the photographer has ever focused on the neighborhood. Thelma Golden, “Of Harlem: An Introduction,” in Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2003), 11. 2. Guyatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Harlem,” Social Text 22, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 116. 3. Alice Attie, Harlem on the Verge (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003), 118. 4. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Disappearing Acts: Capturing Harlem in Transition,” in Harlem on the Verge, by Alice Attie (New York: Quantuck Press, 2003), 19. 5. Attie, Harlem on the Verge, 117. 6. While there has been an African presence in Harlem from very early in its history, the number of African immigrants to the area (including Central and East Harlem as well) has grown over the past three decades. For more on this, see Baffour K. Takyi and Kwame Safo Boate, “Location and Settlement Patterns of African Immigrants in the U.S.: Demographics and Spatial Context,” in The New African Diaspora in North America: Trends, Community Building, and Adaptation, ed. Kwadwo Konadu-Agyeman, Baffour K. Takyi, and John Arthur (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 50–68. 7. The Disney portrait signifies on other elements of Harlem’s present and past. The window behind the young man, for example, reflects the facade of “The United House of Prayer for All People,” which is located across 125th Street from the Disney Store. The church’s reflection functions not only as a palimpsest of the area’s historical connections to the black church—and here it must be remembered that it was Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church that began the black migration to Harlem in the early twentieth century—but also the continuing influence of religious institutions on the area’s development. In the latter instance, the role of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in contemporary Harlem cannot be underestimated, especially because it helped to fund the “Harlem USA” complex. My thanks to Beth Gianfagna for drawing my attention to the reflection in the window.

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures.

Abbott, Berenice, 98 Abyssinian Development Corporation, 200n10, 228–229n81 actors, African American: advice for, 103; in early films, 6, 42–43; in early race films, 62–63, 65–66, 209n34, 210n50; film’s dedication to, 79; Hollywood’s demand for, 69; Hollywood’s increased use of, 84, 129–130; professional and nonprofessional in same film, 118. See also specific people and films Adams, John H., Jr., 6, 31–32, 32, 33 Adams, Michael Henry, 161 advertising and marketing: Claiborne/ VanDerZee portraits used for, 160–163, 161, 164; films, 76–77, 132, 138, 227n59; housing and real estate, 2–3, 26, 45, 46, 157, 159, 206n82 aesthetics, African American: changing style and substance (1980s), 141; elite preferences and tensions in, 8–9, 13, 27–31, 62–64; film excluded from, 41–42, 60, 62–67, 163–164; ideal “types” in, 31–32, 32, 33, 34–39, 37, 38, 41; pre-WWII context of, 4–7; site of definition and debate in, 2; Talented Tenth’s role in defining, 25–27; tensions over popular vs. elite, 43–45, 76; uplift ideology and, 28–31. See also urban aesthetics; specific genres African Americans: authors’ ambivalence about and fascination with Hollywood, 103–106; depictions of families, 182–183; metaphor for celebration and containment of, 88–90, 89, 90, 91; political setbacks for, 23. See also actors; aesthetics; art; black bourgeoisie and elite; identity; politics; popular entertainments; representations; uplift ideology; urban spaces; young males Afrika Bambaataa (hip hop artist), 140 Afro-American Film Company: films of, 62–64, 209n34, 209–210n35; focus of, 68; white investors and founding of, 7, 62

Afro-American Realty Company (Philip A. Payton Jr.): advertising and marketing of, 3, 45, 46, 159; founding of, 54; moral and cultural concerns of, 26; prospectus of, 199n4 Agassiz, Louis, 34, 35, 35, 36, 37 Agee, James: film criticism of, 216n48; independent film collaboration of, 95; liberalism of, 14; works: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (with Evans), 13, 95; In the Street (with Levitt), 106–107. See also The Quiet One (1948) Ahearn, Charlie. See Wild Style (1983) AIP (American International Pictures, earlier American Releasing Corporation), 130, 135, 219–220n10, 220n19 Alexander, William, 84, 87 Alhambra Theatre, 44 Ali, Muhammad, 181 All American Newsreel Company, 87 Allen, James Latimer, 84 Altman, Robert, 220n14 America (1924), 93 American Gangster (2007): approach to, 164–165; box office earnings, 227n58; budget, 179; context of making vs. Harlem’s history in, 184–185; gangster as hero in, 177–183; implications of, 190–191; locations, 185–187, 228n69; marketing of, 227n59; nostalgia’s function in, 17, 18; race acknowledged in, 183–184; soundtrack, 184; stills, 178, 182; storyline, 178–179; temporal schizophrenia in, 177–178, 186–189 American Gangster (television series), 228n79 American International Pictures (AIP, earlier American Releasing Corporation), 130, 135, 219–220n10, 220n19 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 6, 8, 42–43. See also Fights of Nations (1907) Amerie (singer), 161 Am I Guilty? (1940), 83, 213n88 Anthology Film Archives, 218n74

231

232

INDEX

Apollo Theater: Amateur Night of, 76; in blaxploitation film, 131; film premieres at, 86, 213n88; Malcolm X and, 165, 171 architecture: Benjamin on film and, 224n11; black bourgeoisie symbolized in, 143–144, 145–146; in Harlemworld, 163. See also urban spaces Arkoff, Samuel Z., 219–220n10, 220n12 Arnheim, Rudolf, 61 Arnold, Matthew, 27 art, African American: developing criteria for, 56–61; hierarchy in, 27; as propaganda vs. art, 12. See also aesthetics; film; literary arts; urban aesthetics; visual arts Askew, Thomas E., 35, 39 Associated Film Producers of Negro Motion Pictures, 87 Associated Press, 219n2 Astor Pictures, 87 Atkinson, Leslie “Ike,” 227n61 “Atlanta Compromise,” 23 Attie, Alice, 229n1. See also Harlem on the Verge Audubon Ballroom, 225n40 “aura” concept, 18–19, 192 The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Haley): Malcolm X (1992) compared with, 17, 165–169, 171–172; writing screenplay of, 103–105, 164–165, 224n17. See also Malcolm X (1972); Malcolm X (1992) Avedon, Richard, 100 Avery, Val, 133 Aviles, Anthony, 127 Baker, Houston A., 37 Baldwin, James: documentary photography and, 14; film projects of, 103–105; on Harlem ghetto, 88; on Miller’s Cool World, 116; photo-text idea and projects of, 98, 100–101; work on Harlem Stirs, 127; work on Malcolm X, 103–105, 165–166, 224n17, 224n19; works: The Devil Finds Work, 104; Nothing Personal (with Avedon), 100–101, 219n7; One Day, When I Was Lost, 104 Balgley, Robert, 107 Baltimore Afro-American Ledger (newspaper), 26, 86 Bandy, Robert, 90, 91 Banks, Ann, 95 Barber, J. Max, 203n40 Bargain with Bullets (1937), 76 Barnes, Nicky “Mr. Untouchable,” 181–182, 188, 227n66 Baskett, James, 70–71 Battey, C. M., 39 Beastie Boys (hip hop group), 140 Beat Street (1984), 139–140, 221n22 Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn: African Americans in, 141, 221n25; Harlem Riot’s spread to, 219n1 Bee Gees (musical group), 221n23 BEJAC Film Company, 64

Belafonte, Harry, 140 Belász, Béla, 61 Benjamin, Walter, 18–19, 192, 205n52, 224n11 Berry, Halle, 147 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 154 Bhabha, Homi K., 204n51 Biberman, Herbert J., 219n5 The Birth of a Nation (1915), 44, 63, 86, 104, 105, 170 black action films. See blaxploitation films Black Arts movement, 127 Blackbirds (stage, 1928–1929), 70 black bourgeoisie and elite: aesthetic preferences of, 8–9, 13, 27–31, 62–64; approach to, 16; contradictory responses to early popular entertainments, 43–45; dismayed by moviegoers’ behaviors, 6–7; Double-V campaign of, 93; encouraged to move to Harlem, 54–56; ideal “types” of, 34–39, 37, 38, 41, 204n48; Jungle Fever’s symbol of, 143–144, 145–146, 149, 163; McKay’s Home to Harlem criticized by, 57; reticence toward film, 41–42, 60, 62–67, 163–164; social listings of activities, 45–46; white cultural values of, 25–27, 67. See also black churches; citizenship and belonging; Du Bois, W.E.B.; Talented Tenth; Washington, Booker T. Black Caesar (1973): context of, 15, 138; ending recut for, 137, 220n19; The Godfather referenced in, 134, 220n15; mixed genres in, 130–131, 133, 135, 137, 220n12; nostalgic strain of, 142; poster for, 132; sequel to, 220n19; soundtrack, 131, 133; still, 137; storyline and film techniques, 133–137 “Black Caesar” (Frank Matthews), 181–182 black churches: anti-film crusade of, 44; captured in photograph, 196, 229n7; development arm of, 200n10, 228–229n81; key role of, 200n10; migration to Harlem, 4, 54, 200n11, 229n7; photo-text on storefront type of, 100. See also specific churches blackface minstrelsy. See minstrelsy, blackface The Black Hand (1906), 49–50, 70 blackness: Harlem’s place in defining, 189–190; magazine images as signifying, 161–162. See also Harlem; identity Black Panthers, 131 black press: appropriate urban living modeled by, 26; film criticism in, 60, 61. See also specific newspapers and periodicals Blackton, J. Stuart, 205n61 black urban criminality. See urban crime and criminality Blacula (1972), 130 Blair, Sara, 214n11, 217n63 Blake, Eubie, 57, 58, 69, 71 blaxploitation films: conventions of, 15–16; Harlem as urban space in, 130–131, 138–139; key players in, 220n12; movies

INDEX

credited for starting genre, 129–130, 215n29; other conventions mixed with, 131, 133, 135, 137, 176; precursors to, 119‒120; soundtrack conventions of, 131; summary of, 158; traditional male leads in, 131, 220n14. See also Black Caesar; New Jack cinema; New Jack City Blondie (musical group), 139 Body and Soul (1925), 66 Bogart, Humphrey, 170, 171 Bolling, Gary, 118 Bone (1972), 130, 135 Bonnie and Clyde (1967), 129 Bourke-White, Margaret, 13, 94–95 Bourne, St. Claire, 85 Bowser, Pearl, 210n40 Boyd, Todd, 157 Boyer, Anise, 70 Boyz N the Hood (1991), 150, 226n48 Braithwaite, Freddy (Fab 5 Freddy), 139, 153 Brakhage, Stan, 114 British New Wave, 114 Brolin, John, 181 Brooklyn: African Americans in, 141, 221n25, 228n78; diversity of, 222n29; Spike Lee and, 140, 141, 142 Brooks, Clarence, 118 Brotherhood (journal), 66 Brown, Claude, 216n51 Brown, James (musician), 131, 133 Brown, James Lord (architect), 145 Brown, Joshua, 205n61 Brown Buddies (stage, 1930–1931), 70 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 102 The Brute (1920), 65 A Bucket of Cream Ale (1904), 42–43 The Bull Dogger (1921), 200–201n23 Buñuel, Luis, 106 The Burden of His Race (1921), 210n50 Burg, A. W., 62 Burley, Dan, 80, 84 Burnham, Louis, 226n49 Byrd, Sarah, 62 Cabin in the Sky (1943), 84, 170 Cagney, James, 154, 171 Caldwell, Earl, 219n2 Caldwell, Erskine, 13, 95 Call to Duty (1946), 87 Cambridge, Godfrey, 129 Campus, Michael, 131 Capeci, Domenic J., Jr., 214n4 capitalism: and gentrification in Harlem since 1980s, 177–178, 186–188, 190–191; New Jack City’s references to, 153–154; signifiers of, 195–196, 196. See also real estate development Capone, Al, 69 Capra, Frank, 93–94, 214n6 Carbine, Mary, 205n72 Carlyle, Thomas, 27 Carroll, Anne Elizabeth, 58, 202n16, 206n83

233

Carter, Michael (pseud. of Martin Smith): The Quiet One compared with work of, 107, 109, 110; sociology and photo-text project of, 95–96, 98, 214n11 cartes-de-visite, 39, 53 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 102, 215n30 cartoons and comics, 6, 205n61 Carwash (1976), 140 Casablanca (1942), 170 Casby, William, 101 Cassavetes, John, 218n75 censorship, 67, 118, 209–210n35 Chalfant, Henry, 139 Charles, Don, 127 Chenal, Pierre, 103 Chenault, Lawrence, 210n50 Chepesiuk, Ron, 174, 181, 227n66 Chestnutt, Charles, 30 Chicago: Black Belt of, 203n32; black film criticism in, 60; entertainments in, 44; gangster and crime films set in, 211n63; Hoodlum filmed in, 176–177 Chicago Censorship Board, 210n35 Chicago Courier (newspaper), 60 Chicago Defender (newspaper), 26, 44, 207n10 The Chicken Thief (1904), 6, 43 children, African American: film and photographs of, 97, 98, 106, 107, 111; school field trip outside of Harlem, 120. See also education; schools; young males Chitlin’ Circuit, 69 Chong, Rae Dawn, 140 Chopra, Joyce, 217n72 Christopher Columbus and His Swing Band, 80 Christy, Edwin P., 40 Chronique d’un ête/Chronicle of a Summer (1961), 114‒115 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 41 Cincinnati: film shot in, 177 cinema. See film; movie theaters Cinema 16, 117 cinéma vérité, 14, 115 citizenship and belonging: flag as symbol of, 197, 198; prerequisites of, 10; tensions over, in Fights of Nations, 47–50; visibility, identity, and, 193. See also black bourgeoisie and elite; identity City Hall to Harlem (1904), 46–47, 206n84 civil rights movement: direct action and cultural nationalism vs. rhetoric of, 128–129; emergence into mainstream media, 116, 122; photo-text on, 127–128 Claiborne, Barron, 17, 160–163, 161, 164, 223n4 Clanton, Hampton, 118, 121 Clarke, John Henry, 219n5 Clarke, Shirley: Cassavetes assisted by, 218n75; experimental films of, 114, 116, 117; feature films of, 118; film company of, 217n72; film distribution cooperative of,

234

INDEX

Clarke, Shirley (continued) 218n74; independent film collaboration of, 95; liberalism of, 14; in New American Cinema Group collective, 117–118. See also The Cool World (1963) Cleveland Gazette (newspaper), 5 Clinton, Bill, 1, 187 Clockers (1995), 142 clubs and ballrooms: films set in, 72–73; financial difficulties and closures of, 74, 212n69; Malcolm X (1992) scenes in, 171, 225n40; popularity of, in 1920s, 59–60; white mobsters’ control of, 225–226n43. See also movie theaters; theaters Coffy (1973), 130 Cohen, Larry, 130–131, 135, 220n14, 220n19. See also Black Caesar (1973) Coleman, Bessie, 64 Collins, James, 90 Colored America on Parade (1939), 85 Colored Champions of Sport (1939), 85 Colored Feature Photoplay, Inc., 64 Colored Troops Disembarking (1898), 42 color line (Du Bois), 23, 25, 98, 125 Columbia Pictures, 166, 218n89 comics and cartoons, 6, 205n61 Commentator (magazine), 60 Coney Island, 120–121 The Conformist (1970), 154 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 127, 128 The Connection (1962), 118, 122, 218n76 Connelly, Marc, 76, 93. See also The Green Pastures (musical and film) Convent Avenue Baptist Church, 222n32 Cook, Will Marion, 30 The Cool World (1963): aesthetics and film techniques in, 116, 118, 119–123; approach to, 13–15; Attie’s photographs and, 195; audience for, 123‒124, 217n65; collaboration in, 95, 116, 118; context of, 116–117, 122, 124–125, 126–127, 149; reviews, 124; scores for, 123, 217n73; still, 121; Van Peebles influenced by, 129 coon songs and shows, 28, 40–41 Cooper, Barry Michael, 150–151, 152 Cooper, Ralph: background of, 76; in Dark Manhattan still, 79; in gangster films, 9, 68; in Gang War, 82–83; uplift in film of, 79. See also Dark Manhattan (1939); Million Dollar Productions Coppola, Francis Ford: background of, 114; films: The Cotton Club, 224n13; The Godfather, 134, 169, 170, 171, 220n15; The Godfather: Part III, 151 CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), 127, 128 Corman, Roger, 220n10 Cosby, Bill, 139 Costello, Frank, 173 Cotton Club: charity activities of, 75; chorus of, 71; Hoodlum’s depiction of, 176; opening of, 59; white mobsters’ control of, 225–226n43 The Cotton Club (1984), 224n13

Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), 129–130, 131 Couple in Raccoon Coats (Claiborne), 17, 160–163, 161, 164, 223n4 Covarrubias, Miguel, 58, 208n15 Crain, William, 130 crime films: conventions of, 9–10, 129; gangster film conventions mixed with, 151, 179–181; historical context of, 6; model for, 129–130. See also gangster films; organized crime; urban crime and criminality; specific film titles The Crimson Skull (1921), 200–201n23 Cripps, Thomas, 47, 209–210n35, 214n6 The Crisis (journal): decline of, 58; focus of, 57; image and text juxtaposed in, 206n83; “The Negro in Art” symposium of, 59; portrait photographs in, 6; real estate ads in, 26; on real estate and success, 202n16; writers included in, 208n21. See also Du Bois, W.E.B. Crooklyn (1994), 142 Crowe, Russell, 179 Crowther, Bosley, 124 Culbert, David, 214n6 Cullen, Countee, 58, 162 daguerreotypes: Du Bois’s albums, 5, 6, 34–39, 37, 38, 41, 204n48; slave portraits, 34, 35, 36 Daily Worker (newspaper), 98 dance, 42, 60, 117. See also hip hop culture; vaudeville theater Dance in the Sun (1953), 117 Dark Manhattan (1939): The Cool World compared with, 119; gangsters and numbers racket in, 77–79, 176, 180; Harlem cachet of, 76–77; Hoodlum compared with, 172; Malcolm X (1992) compared with, 168; Moon over Harlem compared with, 80; responses to, 86; setting and context, 9, 13, 70, 82; still, 79 Darktown Revue (1931), 72–73 David H. Massey (real estate firm), 199n4 Davis, Griffin J., 215n30 Davis, Guy, 140 Davis, Ossie, 129, 145, 219n5 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 130 de Antonio, Emile, 117 DeCarava, Roy, 102 Dee, Ruby, 145 The Defiant Ones (1958), 122 Def Jam Records, 140, 157 delinquents. See juvenile delinquents Delluc, Louis, 61 De Palma, Brian, 114. See also Scarface (1983) Deren, Maya, 117 detective stories and films, 116, 131 Detour (1946), 213n83 Detroit: “Young Boys Incorporated” in, 152 Diary of a Harlem Family (1962), 215n29 Dickerson, Ernest, 140, 141. See also Juice (1992) Dillinger, John, 69 Disney Store, 195–196, 196, 229n7

INDEX

documentary films: changing aesthetics in, 114–116, 117‒118; conventions of, 14; fictional mode combined with, 106–110; first known black-produced, 64; on hip hop culture and graffiti, 139–141; on Malcolm X, 216n41. See also history films; nonfiction and newsreel films; specific film titles documentary photography: depression-era, 94–95, 100; Parks’s “Harlem Gang Leader” as, 111, 112, 113–114; power of, 192–198; power to document past/present, 192–198; use and meaning of, 10, 13–14; of young men involved in riot, 88–90, 89, 90, 91. See also photo-text Doing Their Bit (1918), 210n41 Do the Right Thing (1989), 142, 149 double consciousness, 28, 56–57, 101 Douglas, Aaron, 56, 58, 208n15 Downing Film Company, 64 Drew, Robert, 115 drug trade (heroin and crack cocaine): capitalism applied to, 178, 180–181, 186–187; Harlem decimated by, 149; Jungle Fever’s references to, 142, 147–149; New Jack City’s references to, 152–154, 157; reporting on crack epidemic, 151. See also urban crime and criminality Du Bois, Shirley Graham, 226n49 Du Bois, W.E.B.: aesthetics of, 57, 59–60, 76; on color line, 23, 25, 98; decline of reputation in Harlem, 58–59; double consciousness concept of, 28, 56–57, 101; folk culture interests of, 33; Freedomways and, 226n49; move to Harlem, 56; political stance and definitions of, 23–24, 27, 67; representation concerns and, 8, 32; silent protest march of, 51, 52–53, 54; in Vibe’s essay, 162; on Washington, 24, 201n4; works: “Criteria of Negro Art,” 59; “Negro Art,” 57; “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and the Others,” 24; “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” 201n1; The Philadelphia Negro, 25, 26; The Souls of Black Folk, 23, 24, 33, 201n2; Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., 5, 6, 34–39, 37, 38, 41, 193, 204n48. See also The Crisis; Talented Tenth Duke, Bill, 164, 177. See also Hoodlum (1997) The Duke Is Tops (1938), 76 Dulac, Germaine, 60, 61 Dunbar, Paul Laurence: aesthetics of, 76; dialect writing of, 30–31; migrants’ tales of, 165. See also The Sport of the Gods Eakins, Thomas, 32 East River Houses, 92 East St. Louis (Ill.): race riot in, 52–53 Easy Rider (1969), 129 Ebony (magazine), 215n30 economic development. See capitalism; real estate development Edison Company: films of, 6, 42–43, 46–47, 206n84; popular subject matter of, 8

235

education as key to uplift ideology, 26. See also black bourgeoisie and elite; schools Edward Lewis Productions, 85 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 101 Eisenstein, Sergei, 61, 98 Ejiofor, Chiwetel, 181 Ellington, Edward Kennedy “Duke,” 162 Ellis, Aunjaune, 161 Ellison, Ralph, 98, 101, 105, 109 Emmett, Dan, 40 entertainments. See film; movie theaters; popular entertainments; theaters Epstein, Jean, 61 Equitable Life Assurance Society, 145 eugenics, 31–32, 34–35, 40, 94 Eureka Film Co., Inc., 64 Europe, James Reese, 51 Evans, Walker, 13, 94, 95 Evens, Estelle, 107 Everett, Anna: on black film criticism, 60, 61; on black press and Talented Tenth, 209n26; on Malcolm X (1992) and The Godfather, 169, 170, 172 experimental films: aesthetics of, 117‒118; cooperative support for, 217n72; first shot wholly on location, 115‒116; French projects, 60; Moscow project, 102, 209n29; subjects and technologies in, 114–116; urban realism of, 126–127. See also specific film titles Fab 5 Freddy (Freddy Braithwaite), 139, 153 Fabre, Michel, 215n36 Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 135 Fama, Joseph, 222n28 Farm Security Administration (FSA), 94–95, 100 Fat Boys (hip hop group), 140 Fauset, Jessie, 58, 59 Federal Writers’ Project, 94–95, 98 Felton, Bostic, 118 fictional films: changing aesthetics in, 114–116, 117‒118; detective stories, 116, 131; documentary mode combined with, 106–110; nonfictional techniques combined with, 119–123. See also specific film titles Fights of Nations (1907): African Americans depicted in, 20–22; “America, the Land of the Free” in, 20, 21, 47, 48; approach to, 12; responses to, 47; “Sunny Africa, Eighth Avenue, New York” in, 47–48; tensions of urbanization, criminality, and citizenship in, 47–50, 70 film: agency and progress disavowed in, 42–43; black bourgeoisie’s reticence toward, 41–42, 60, 62–67, 163–164; early depiction of Harlem in, 46–47; as entertainment vs. uplift, 7, 44–45; genre production shift in, 68–69, 70; hip hop influences on, 150; industry-wide ratings system of, 129; Jazz Age influences on, 60;

236

INDEX

film (continued) as key in defining black identity, 163–164; minstrel show and vaudeville influences on, 6, 7, 11–12, 41, 62, 69; photo-text in relation to, 98–99, 103–106; for Yiddishspeaking audience, 213n83. See also aesthetics; blaxploitation films; crime films; documentary films; experimental films; fictional films; gangster films; history films; Hollywood films; New Jack cinema; nonfiction and newsreel films; race films; western films Film Comment (journal), 124 film criticism, 60, 61, 216n48. See also specific film titles film festival screenings: The Connection, 122; The Cool World, 124, 217n65; La permission/The Story of a Three-Day Pass, 218n89; Wild Style, 139, 220n21 film industry, African American: beginnings of, 7–10; companies listed (1914–1925), 63–64; early Harlem companies, 62–67; first African American company, 42; pre-WWII context of, 4–7; record companies’ collaboration with, 221n23; renaissance in 1990s, 150; resurgence in 1980s, 139–141. See also race film industry film industry, white: blacks excluded from, 7, 44; first projected pictures of, 5; popular (stereotyped) borrowings of, 6; retooled in 1970s, 129. See also Hollywood films Filmmakers, Inc., 118, 217n72 Film-Maker’s Cooperative, 217–218n74 Film-Makers Distribution Center, 218n74 Film Quarterly (journal), 124 Films and Filming (journal), 124 Finley, Cheryl: essay in Harlemworld, 159–160, 163; images accompanying essay of, 160–163, 161, 223n4 Fire!! (magazine), 60, 208–209n25 Fishburne, Laurence, 173, 226n48 Fisher, Rudolph, 57, 165, 189 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 103 Fitzgerald, Ella, 167 Flavor Fav (hip hop artist), 153 Fleming, Victor, 99 The Flying Ace (1926), 200–201n23 folk culture: dialect writing evocative of, 30–31; Tanner’s paintings linked to, 32–34 Ford, John, 93 Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), 141 Fortune (magazine), 95–96 Foster, Gloria, 118 Foster Photoplay Company (William Foster, Chicago), 7–8, 42, 62 Foxx, Redd, 129 Foxy Brown (1974), 130 France: Chronique d’un ête/Chronicle of a Summer (1961), 114‒115; film experimentation in, 60, 114‒115; La permission/The Story of a Three-Day Pass made in, 128–129. See also cinéma vérité

Frank, Leo, 73 Frank, Robert, 117 Franklyn, Irwin R. See Harlem Is Heaven (1932) Fraser, Harry L. See Dark Manhattan (1939) Frazer, E. Franklin, 74–75 Frazier, Joe, 181 Frederick Douglass Film Company (N.J.), 64 Freedomways (journal), 174, 226n49 Frye, Edward, 64 FSA (Farm Security Administration), 94–95, 100 Fuller, Meta Vaux Warrick, 32, 204n41 Gaines, Kevin, 30 Gale, Moe. See Savoy Ballroom Galton, Francis, 35 Gang Smashers (1939), 82 gangsta (gang member, gangster): changing figure of, 16, 135–136; choices of, 174; gangsta and gangster distinguished, 149, 150; gangster and gang member distinguished, 119; as global capitalist, 178, 180–181, 186–187; gun choices of, 131, 132; as hero, 17–18, 135, 151, 172–183; “hip hop gangsta” term, 222n35; Parks’s photoessay on, 110‒111, 112, 113–114. See also juvenile delinquents; New Jack City (1991); young males; specific gangster figures gangsta rap, 150, 157 gangster films: basic and revised conventions of, 173–177; Black Hand films as precursors to, 49–50; classic and revisionist periods of, 154–155; crime film conventions mixed with, 151, 179–181; determinist conclusions in, 212n76; father-son dynamics in, 170; Hollywood conventions of, 13, 69, 77–78, 82–83, 84, 135–136; Malcolm X on, 170–171 gangster films, African American: approach to, 10–11, 12–13; central themes of, 153–154; conventions of, 15, 70–75; The Cool World influenced by, 119; development of, 75–83; Hollywood films in relation to, 68–70; Malcolm X’s use of conventions, 17, 168–171; musical numbers in, 225n36; New Jack cinema mixed with, 150; other conventions mixed with, 131, 133, 135, 137, 165; politics and culture explored in, 9; rogue cop genre linked to, 151, 179. See also American Gangster; Black Caesar; crime films; Hoodlum; New Jack City Gang War (1939), 76, 82–83, 84 Garvey, Marcus, 58, 165, 226n46. See also Universal Negro Improvement Association Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 5, 27, 40 Gelber, Jack, 118, 218n76 Gerstner, David A., 209n28 ghetto living: in blaxploitation films, 130–131, 138–139; The Cool World filmed in midst of, 120–123, 121; as familiar film trope, 126; Harlem Stirs (photo-text) on,

INDEX

127–128; Parks’s photo-essay on gang leader, 110‒111, 112, 113–114; psychological effects of, 108–110. See also New Jack cinema; urban spaces Gillespie, Dizzy, 123 Gilligan, Thomas, 126–127 Gilpin, Charles H., 62 Gilroy, Paul, 201n2 The Girl from Chicago (1932), 211n63 Glidden, George Robbins, 34 The Godfather (1972): Malcolm X (1992) compared with, 169, 170, 171; referenced in Black Caesar, 134, 220n15 The Godfather: Part III (1990), 151 Goeser, Caroline, 208n15 Goldberg, Bert, 68, 70, 82 Goldberg, Jack: characteristics of gangster films of, 70, 82; companies of, 68; uplift in Miracle in Harlem, 87, 213–214n99 The Gold Bug (stage show, 1896), 41 Golden, Thelma, 162, 163, 229n1 Gold Talking Picture Company, 68 Gone with the Wind (1939), 99, 103 Gooding, Cuba, Jr., 181 Gotham Organization, 197, 229n82 Gough, Earl, 80, 83 Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Saddler), 139 Grandmaster Melle Mel (Melvin Glover), 140 Grant, Barry Keith, 218n76, 218n80 Grease (1978), 221n23 Great Depression: documentary photography of, 94–95, 100; social and economic hardships in Harlem, 14–15, 74–76 Green, Cora, 80 Green, Paul, 103 Green Fields (1937), 213n83 The Green Pastures (musical and film), 69, 76, 93, 99 Grieveson, Lee, 49 Griffin, Junius, 219n2 Griffith, D. W.: America, 93; The Birth of a Nation, 44, 63, 86, 104, 105, 170 Griffiths, Alison, 64 Grimké, Angelina, 58 Grundy, James, 42 Guerrier, Adler, 229n1 The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921), 73, 211n59 Haley, Alex. See The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Haley) Half-Century (magazine), 60 Hallelujah! (1929), 69 Halstead, Frank, 127 Harlan, Louis R., 203n40 Harlem: Bensonhurst compared with, 142–145, 144; commodification of, 190–191; continuing revisions of, 192–198; demographic changes, 54–56, 188–189, 222–223n36, 229n6; depression-related social and economic hardships, 14–15, 74–76; development and gentrification since 1980s, 177–178, 186–188, 190–191; as

237

epicenter for African Americans, 2–4, 14, 141, 189; integration since 1990s, 188–190, 197; legacy of past vs. reality of present as coexisting in, 144–149; as photo-text and sociological subject, 94–96, 97, 98; poverty rate (2002), 224n5; pre-1920s depictions in mass media, 45–50; pre-WWII context of, 4–7; as promised land, 13, 167; protest and military parade in, compared, 51–54, 52, 53; renaming in, 228n68; rent strikes in, 127, 128; as “ruin,” 109; salvage anthropology of, 185; sites of memory in, 17, 159–160; as symbol of modernity, 76; as urban space in gangster films, 72–74, 75–83; “wasness” of, 1–2; white mobsters’ hold over, 80–81, 172–175, 183–184, 226nn43–45; young black males as signifier of problems in, 114. See also black bourgeoisie and elite; clubs and ballrooms; drug trade; film; “Mecca of the Negroes”; photography; popular entertainments; Prohibition; real estate development Harlem after Midnight (1934), 72, 73, 76 “Harlem Document” (photo-text project), 95–97, 98 Harlem Hell-Fighters (369th Infantry Regiment), 51–54, 53 Harlem Hospital, 75, 92 Harlem Is Heaven (1932): characteristics of, 70–71; gangster subplot, 71–72; marketing of, 76–77; prologue of (transcribed), 211n61; setting and context, 13, 70; still, 72 Harlem Nights (1989), 164 “Harlem on My Mind” (exhibition), 162, 214n8, 224n7 Harlem on the Verge (Attie): approach to, 18–19; description of, 192; photographs in, 194, 196, 198; primary subjects of, 192–193; questions raised by, 198; variety of representations in, 194–197 Harlem Renaissance: approach to, 12–13; Civic Club dinner and, 57–59; differences over art criteria in, 56–61; film’s marginalized status in, 66–67; historical precursors in, 31; migrants’ stories and, 3–4, 165, 189; mythology of, 92; patrons of, 78; portrait artists linked to, 84, 214n8; recent “renaissance” in relation to, 188–190. See also nostalgic reconstructions of Harlem; specific artists and writers Harlem Riot (1935), 74–75, 81, 92, 109 Harlem Riot (1943): conditions surrounding, 92–93, 101, 109, 214n4; discourse in aftermath of, 110; events of, 90–92; film production decline after, 84; photographs of young men involved in, 88–90, 89, 90, 91 Harlem Riot (1964), 126–127, 219n1, 219n3 Harlem River Houses, 75, 92 Harlem Stirs (photo-text), 126, 127–128, 134, 219n7

238

INDEX

Harlem Types (Reiss, drawings), 58, 207–208n14, 208n15 “Harlem USA” development, 190, 197, 228–229n81, 229n7, 229n82 “Harlemworld” and Harlemworld (exhibition and catalogue): approach to, 16–17; artists in, 229n1; Claiborne’s Couple in, 160, 161, 162–163, 223n4; on sites of memory, 159–160 Harlem Writers Guild, 127 Harper, Charles L., 33 Harper’s Weekly (magazine), 3, 48 Harris, Buddy, 80 Harris, Julius, 219n5 Harris, Kira Lynn, 229n1 Harrison, R. B. (Richard Berry), 79 Hauptmann, Bruno, 85 Hawkins, Yusef, 142–143, 144, 221n27, 221–222n28 Hawks, Howard. See Scarface (1932) Haynes, Hunter C., 7–8, 62–63 Haynes Photoplay Company, 62, 63 Hearts in Dixie (1929), 69 He Got Game (1999), 142 Heisler, Stuart, 93–94 Hell Up in Harlem (1973), 220n19 Herald Pictures, 87 Herndon, Cleo, 86 Hessling, Catherine, 60 Hicks, Wilson, 111 Hill, Jack, 130 Hill, Leslie Pinckney, 57 Himes, Chester, 116, 130, 177, 217n68 hip hop culture: films on, 139–141; influential role of, 141–142, 150; magazine images of, 160–163, 161, 164. See also Scarface (1983) “hip hop gangsta,” 222n35 history films: context of making vs. Harlem’s history in, 171–172, 184–185; conventions of, 165; emergence of Harlem in, 164–165, 171–172, 177; nostalgia’s function in, 17–18, 164. See also American Gangster; documentary films; Hoodlum; Malcolm X; nonfiction and newsreel films; nostalgic reconstructions of Harlem Hogan, Ernest, 41 Hogan’s Alley (comic strip), 205n61 Hollywood films: big-budget movie on Harlem, 129–130, 179; black critics of, 98; black gangster films in relation to, 68–70; black intellectuals’ ambivalence about and fascination with, 103–106; blockbuster filmmakers as focus, 138; civil rights discourse in, 122; Cooper’s move to, 76–77; Ellison on, 105; gradual change in depiction of African Americans, 93; hip hop projects, 139–141; marketing of, 138; race films vs., 67; road movie conventions of, 129. See also film industry, white; gangster films; specific film titles Holstein, Casper: as arts and community patron, 78, 226n49; Dark Manhattan and,

176; as Harlem property owner, 191; kidnapped, 212n81; numbers racket of, 78, 80; as race man and hero, 173, 178, 180 The Homesteader (1919), 65–66, 67 hood films. See New Jack cinema Hoodlum (1997): approach to, 164–165; film techniques, 176–177; implications of, 190–191; narrative of, 172–175; nostalgia’s function in, 17–18, 186 Hopkins, Pauline, 30 Hopper, Dennis, 129 Horne, Lena, 76 Houseman, John, 103, 214n6 housing. See real estate development Howells, William Dean, 30 How High Is Up? (1923), 64 Hudlin brothers, 150 Huggins, Johnny, 60 Hughes, Langston: on artists and art criteria, 59, 60, 209n25; Cartier-Bresson’s relationship with, 102, 215n30; film projects of, 103, 209n29; Frank Lucas’s memories in relation to, 189; photo-text idea and, 98; poetry in Survey Graphic, 58; portrait of, 85; in Vibe’s essay, 162; visual approach of, 102; works: “Is Hollywood Fair to Negroes?,” 103; “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 209n25; “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” 103, 208n21; St. Louis Woman, 103; The Sweet Flypaper of Life (with DeCarava), 102 Hurston, Zora Neale, 56, 60, 61, 162 Ice T (rapper), 153, 156 Ichaso, Leon, 164 identity, African American: cultural and political redefinition in, 22; film as key to defining, 163–164; film sound technology and crisis in, 68, 72–73; Harlem as symbol of modernity and, 76; pre–Harlem Renaissance exploration of, 41; terminology for, 5–6. See also New Negro ideology; representations Immerman, Mo, 226n43 Immigration Acts (1921 and 1924), 69 industrialization: gangster films linked to, 69–70; historical context of, 2; urban migration linked to, 55. See also urbanization Information and Education Unit (U.S. Army), 93–94, 214n5 In the Heat of the Night (1967), 104 In the Street (1948), 107‒108 The Iron Horse (1924), 93 Italian Neorealism, 114, 116, 120 Jackson, Brian Keith, 161 Jackson, George, 140, 150–151. See also New Jack City (1991) Jackson, John L., Jr., 1–2 Jackson, Red, 111, 112, 113–114 Jackson, Samuel L., 147

INDEX

Jacobson, Mark: Original Gangster (with King), 184; “The Return of Superfly,” 178–179, 180, 181, 184–185, 189 James Grundy, Buck and Wing Dance (1895), 42 James Grundy, Cake Walk (1895), 42 Jameson, Fredric, 18, 164 Jazz Age aesthetics, 60, 74 The Jazz Singer (1927), 69 Jeffrey, Michael, 133 Jeffrey, Omer, 133 Jewison, Norman, 104, 165–166 Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop (1984), 141 Johns, Tracy Camilla, 153, 156 Johnson, Albert, 123, 124 Johnson, Charles S.: Civic Club dinner planned by, 57–59; on Harlem as “Mecca,” 1, 2; “Harlem Issue” of, 31, 58; on Nigger Heaven, 60. See also Opportunity Johnson, Ellsworth “Bumpy”: American Gangster’s depiction of, 177–178, 178, 179; death of, 177, 178, 227n56; experiences in Harlem, 165, 185, 188; Hoodlum’s depiction of, 17–18, 173–175, 176, 226n45, 226n48; Lucas on, 180, 227n62; as Mafia/Mob’s enforcer, 175–176, 226n51; published poetry of, 174, 226n49; Shaft’s depiction of, 176 Johnson, James Weldon: Dunbar and, 30; Harlem and, 1, 2, 4, 56; on Nigger Heaven, 60; portrait of, 85; silent protest march of, 51, 52–53, 54 Johnson, Sterling, 185 Johnson-Jeffries Fight (1910), 64 Jones, Dewey, 207n10 Jones, Peter P., 64, 67, 210n40 Jubilee Pictures, 68 Juice (1992), 150, 164, 223n37 Jungle Fever (1991): context of, 15, 150; drug references in, 142, 147–149; Harlemworld’s reference to, 163; Hawkins’s presence in, 142–143, 144, 221–222n28; locations and film techniques, 16, 142, 143–149, 164; Malcolm X (1992) compared with, 172; miscegenation as subject of, 142–143; soundtrack, 143, 148; stills, 144, 147 juvenile delinquents: approach to, 13–15; Clarke’s The Cool World about, 116–125, 121; documentary/fictional film about school for (see The Quiet One); Parks’s “Harlem Gang Leader” as, 111, 112, 113–114. See also gangsta (gang member, gangster); young males Kassell, Hyman, 226n43 Keighley, William. See The Green Pastures (musical and film) Kelley, Robin D. G., 192, 198 Kellogg, Paul, 58. See also Survey Graphic Kelly, Robert J., 226n44, 226n51 Kennedy, Joe, 154, 155 Kennedy, John F., 115 Killens, John Oliver, 126, 127–128, 134, 219n5 King, Aliya S., 184

239

King, David H., Jr., 145 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 101 kinoglaz and kinopravda films, 100, 115 Kozarski, Richard, 211n59 Kramer, Stanley, 122 Krush Groove (1985), 139, 140, 141 Ku Klux Klan, 44, 63, 65, 69, 169 Lafayette Players, 210n50 Lafayette Theatre, 63, 64, 209n34 La Guardia, Fiorello, 74–75, 92 Lange, Dorothea, 94 Langford, Sam, 63 Larsen, Nella, 189 The Last Dragon (1985), 140 The Last of the Finest (1990), 151 Latham, James, 64 Lathan, Stan. See Beat Street (1984) Latifah, Queen, 152, 153, 155 Lawrence, Richard, 86 Lawrence Talking Pictures, 86 Lawrenson, Helen, 226n47 Layne, Lou, 73 Leacock, Richard, 115, 117, 217n72 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), 163 Lee, Canada, 118 Lee, Carl, 14, 116, 118 Lee, Spike: attitude toward religious zeal, 222n32; Brooklyn connections of, 140, 141–142; campaign against white director for Malcolm X, 165–166; as character in Jungle Fever, 145; on James Baldwin and Malcolm X, 224n19; on Jungle Fever, 142; on shooting Malcolm X, 171; success of, 150; films: Do the Right Thing, 142, 149; Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop, 141; She’s Gotta Have It, 140, 141. See also Jungle Fever (1991); Malcolm X (1992) Léger, Fernand, 60 Lehman, Herbert H., 92 Lem Hawkin’s Confession/Murder in Harlem (1935), 70, 72, 73–74 Leonard, Arthur H. See Straight to Heaven (1939) LeRoy, Mervyn. See Little Caesar (1931) Levitt, Helen: depression-era photographs by, 94–95; film projects of, 95, 106; liberalism of, 14; project with Wright, 99; works: “Photographs of Children,” 106, 107; In the Street (with Agee), 106‒107. See also The Quiet One (1948) Levitt, William, 216n50 Levy, Robert, 210n50 Lewis, David Levering, 39, 58, 199n3 Lewis, Edward W., 84, 85–86 les lieux de memoire (sites of memory) concept, 17, 159–160 Life (magazine): civil rights movement images in, 116; film criticism for, 216n48; founding of, 94; Parks’s “Harlem Gang Leader” in, 111, 112, 113–114; popularity of, 95; staff photographer of, 102

240

INDEX

Life in Harlem (1939–1940), 85 Lights of New York (1928), 69 Lincoln, C. Eric, 122 Lincoln Motion Picture Company, 8 Lincoln Pictures (Goldberg brothers), 68, 70 Lindbergh, Charles, 85 Lindo, Delroy, 168 Lindsay, Vachel, 61 literary arts: approach to, 11; hierarchy of, 30; historical precursors in, 28–31; numbers running mentioned in, 212n79; urban conditions described in, 116; vernacular dialect in, 30–31, 117, 118. See also Harlem Renaissance; photo-text; specific writers Little, Rivka Gewirtz, 228–229n81 Little Caesar (1931), 69, 131, 135, 170 The Living Theater, 218n76 LL Cool J (rapper), 140, 222n35 Locke, Alain: aesthetics of, 57, 58, 59, 76; folk culture interests of, 33; on Harlem’s decline, 75–76; “New Negro” term of, 5; Reiss’s images and, 207–208n14; work: The New Negro, 58, 59, 208n15, 208n18. See also Survey Graphic Lockhart, Calvin, 129 Loeb, Janice, 107, 216n50 Look (magazine), 95–97, 98, 111 Louis, Joe, 85, 101, 171, 181, 225n22 Louis, Marva, 85 Lovie Joe’s Romance (1914), 62–63, 209n34 Lubin Manufacturing Company, 42 Lucas, Frank “Superfly”: on Bumpy Johnson, 180, 227n62; depicted as hero, 18, 151, 179–183; experiences in Harlem, 165, 189; later years of, 184, 188; nickname of, 181; profile of, 178–179, 180, 181, 184–185; real estate interests of, 228n73. See also American Gangster (2007) Lucas, George, 114 Lucas, Sam, 28 Luce, Clarence S., 145 Luciano, Charles “Lucky,” 172, 173, 174 Lund, Art, 133 Lybia Club, 73 lynching: early films on, 65, 67; fiction involving, 29; miscegenation linked to, 142–143; silent protest march against, 51, 52, 52–53, 54; urban migration linked to, 30, 55. See also racial violence Macero, Teo, 217n73 The Mack (1973), 131 MacRae, Wendell, 96 Madden, Owen, 75, 80, 173. See also Cotton Club Madison Square Garden, 181, 199n6 Malcolm X. See X, Malcolm Malcolm X (1972), 216n41, 224n17 Malcolm X (1992): approach to, 164–165; background and screenplay, 103–105, 164–165, 224n17, 224n19; context of making vs. Harlem’s history in, 171–172; gangster film conventions in, 17, 168–171;

Hoodlum compared with, 172; on Malcolm’s experiences in Harlem, 166–169; newsreel footage in, 225n39; soundtrack, 167; still, 167 Manhatta (1921), 60 Manhattan: skyscraper construction documented in, 117; Tenderloin district of, 3–4, 27, 48, 199n6 (see also Fights of Nations; The Sport of the Gods) Manning, Jack, 215n19 “marketable shock” concept, 114, 217n63 Markopoulos, Gregory, 114–117 Marks, Carole, 207n7 Marshall, Mark, 152 Marzani, Carl, 127 M*A*S*H (1970), 220n14 mass media: black and white reporters in, 219n2; black inferiority images in, 40–42, 44, 205n61; civil rights discourse in, 116, 122; ghetto conditions depicted in, 126; Harlem defined as problem in, 13–15; Harlem Riot (1964) coverage and, 127, 219nn2–3. See also black press; film; newspapers and magazines; photography Matthews, Frank “Black Caesar,” 181–182 Maysles, Albert, 115, 217n72 McBride, Chi, 173 McGilligan, Patrick, 212n66 McHenry, Doug, 140, 150–151, 152, 154. See also New Jack City (1991) McKay, Claude: move to Harlem, 56; on numbers racket, 78, 212n79; poetry in Survey Graphic, 58; political stance, 57; portrait of, 85; works: Harlem Glory, 78; Harlem Shadows, 57, 58, 207n10; Home to Harlem, 28, 56–57 McKee, Lonette, 144 McKim, Mead and White (architecture firm), 145 “Mecca of the Negroes”: commodification of, 190–191; Johnson’s use of term, 1, 2; transformation into, 87, 193 Mekas, Jonas: background of, 114; film distribution cooperative of, 217–218n74; The Living Theater filmed by, 218n76; in New American Cinema Group collective, 117 Melle Mel (Grandmaster Melle Mel), 140 Merrill, Garry, 107 “message movie” cycle, 217n65 Metalious, Grace, 217n66 Meteor Film Productions, 79–80, 81 Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Harlem on My Mind” (exhibition), 162, 214n8, 224n7 Meyers, Sidney, 95, 107. See also The Quiet One (1948) Micheaux, Oscar: aesthetics of, 65–66; background of, 64, 65; gangster and crime films of, 70, 72–74, 76, 211n63; locations used by, 211n59; marginalized status of, 66–67; white investors of, 211n62, 212n66 Micheaux Book and Motion Picture Company, 8

INDEX

Micheaux Film Company (later, Corporation): films of, 65–67; founding and move to New York, 64, 65; reorganization of, 211n62 Michele, Michael, 156 “Midtowners” (gang). See Jackson, Red Mieth, Hansel, 96 migrants and migration: belated acknowledgment of, 140–141; black churches’ role in, 4, 54, 200n11, 229n7; black elite and, 24–25; dreams of, 20, 55–56, 165, 193; historical context of, 2–4; information traded among, 207n7; leisure and entertainments of, 28–29, 43–45; New York and Harlem destinations of, 54–56; southern ties reaffirmed by, 205n72. See also Fights of Nations (1907); popular entertainments; The Sport of the Gods Miller, Warren, 116–117, 118, 217n66. See also The Cool World (1963) Million Dollar Productions: founding of, 68; gangster films of, 82–83; Lewis’s films distributed by, 85; name and budget of, 210n51; projects of, 76 Mills, Florence, 79 Minnelli, Vincente, 84, 93 minstrelsy, blackface: black preferences for, 28–29; early film influenced by, 6, 11–12, 69, 73–74; performance mode of, 40–41 Miracle in Harlem (1948), 87, 213–214n99 miscegenation, 65, 221n27. See also Jungle Fever (1991) Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 60 A Moment in Love (1957), 117 montage and collage: aesthetics of, 98, 100; in American Gangster, 180–181; in gangster films, 133–134, 175; in New Jack City, 152, 155 Moon over Harlem (1939): gangster plot, 79–80; setting and context, 13, 70, 81–82; still, 83 Morgan, Thomas, 28–29 Morin, Edgar, 114 Moss, Arthur, 64 Moss, Carlton, 66, 93–94 Motown Productions, 221n23 movie theaters: black preferences for, 29; middle-class critique of, 44–45; popularity of, 41–42, 43–44; shift from live performance venues to, 212n29. See also clubs and ballrooms; theaters Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 113 Muhammed, Elijah, 166 Munby, Jonathan, 69–70, 154 Muni, Paul, 131 Münsterberg, Hugo, 61 Murphy, Eddie, 164 Muse, Clarence, 77, 79, 79, 103 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA): “The New City” (exhibition), 163; “Photographs of Children” (exhibition), 106, 107 musical films: Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters shorts, 71; Hollywood genre of, 69; Malcolm X on, 170–171; Schultz’s reputation in, 140 mythology, 20–22, 105

241

NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 56, 58–59, 93. See also The Crisis Nadal, Lymari, 181 Nail and Parker (real estate firm), 46, 199n4 The Nation (magazine), 124, 216n48 national character and community: blacks excluded from, 48–49; mythology of, 20–22; The Negro Soldier as highlighting, 93–94 Nation of Islam (NOI), 166, 224n19 “The Negro in Art” (symposium), 59 The Negro Soldier (1944), 93–94 Nelson, Judd, 156 New American Cinema Group collective, 117–118 “The New City” (exhibition), 163 New Edition (R&B group), 140 Newfield, Samuel. See Am I Guilty? (1940) New Jack cinema, 15–16, 150, 158. See also blaxploitation films; New Jack City (1991) New Jack City (1991): American Gangster compared with, 179; Attie’s photographs and, 195; box office earnings, 227n58; context of, 15, 150; inspiration and references in, 151, 154–157, 223n46; Jungle Fever as introduction to, 142; Malcolm X (1992) in relation to, 172; setting, 16, 151–154, 157, 164; soundtrack, 152, 153, 155; still, 156; text at end of, 157 A New Negro for a New Century (collection), 5, 6 New Negro ideology: approach to, 11; citizenship and belonging in, 197; cultural and political redefinition by, 22; discourse surrounding, 2; film’s utility in, 61, 62; gangsters linked to, 18, 81; historical context of, 5–6; ideal “type” of man, 32, 33; ideal “type” of woman, 31–32, 32; “Old Negro” cultural values rejected in, 27; visual culture in construction of, 58. See also aesthetics; representations New Republic (magazine), 124 newspapers and magazines: black film criticism in, 60, 61; black writers and audience of, 209n26; cartoons and comics in, 6, 205n61; image and text juxtaposed in, 206n83; minstrel show images in, 205n61; photojournalism for, 84–86; real estate ads in, 2–3, 26, 45, 46, 206n82; social listings in, 45–46; visual organization of, 46–47. See also black press New York (magazine), 178–179, 180, 181, 184–185, 189 New York Age (newspaper): accounts of urban life in, 26; black film criticism in, 60; on film’s potential, 7, 45; on Haynes’s nonfiction film, 63; on Lem Hawkin’s Confession/Murder in Harlem, 73; mode of

242

INDEX

New York Age (newspaper) (continued) address in, 46; on One Large Evening, 209n34, 209–210n35; photographs in, 85; real estate ads in, 2–3, 45, 46, 206n82; visual organization of, 46 New York Amsterdam News (newspaper): on Edward Lewis, 86; Harlem scolded in riot aftermath, 92; on Meteor Film Productions, 81; on Moon over Harlem, 80; on newsreel films, 87; photographs in, 85; real estate ads in, 2–3 New York City: demolition for developing Pennsylvania Station, 199n6; infrastructure expansion of, 206n84; migration to, 54–56; protest and military parade in, compared, 51–54, 52, 53; race and space in, 143; school fieldtrip to landmarks of, 120. See also Bedford-Stuyvesant; Brooklyn; Harlem; Manhattan New York Daily News (newspaper), 85 New Yorker (magazine), 124 New York Herald (newspaper), 48 New York New Directors/New Films (festival), 139 New York Photo League: Attie’s photographs reminiscent of, 195; origins of, 84; photo-text project of, 94, 95, 96, 215n19; works in Daily Worker, 98. See also Levitt, Helen New York Times (newspaper): Barnes on cover of Magazine, 182; on The Cool World, 124; on displacement and gentrification, 187–188; on Harlem Riot (1964), 219n2; as symbol of middle class, 144; on Tenderloin riot (1900), 48 New York World (newspaper), 205n61 New York World’s Fair (1939), 96 Niagara Movement, 203n40 Nicholson, James H., 219–220n10, 220n12 nickelodeons, 29, 43–45 The Ninth Negro Cavalry Watering Horses (1898), 42 Noe, Joey, 80 NOI (Nation of Islam), 166, 224n19 nonfiction and newsreel films: black actors in early, 42–43; fictional film techniques combined with, 119–123; of Harlem Hell-Fighters’ return, 52; interwar years, 84, 85–87; praise for, 63–64, 86; WWII efforts supported in, 93–94. See also documentary films; history films; specific film titles Nora, Pierre, 17, 159–160 Norman Film Manufacturing Company, 8, 200–201n23 nostalgic reconstructions of Harlem: approach to, 16–18; Black Caesar and, 142; Bumpy Johnson as race man, 174–175; commodification of, 190–191; film as key to, 163–164; film techniques in, 176–177; gangster conventions in Malcolm X (1992) as, 17, 168–171; identification of, 193; integration since 1990s in relation to,

188–190, 197; in Lucas’s film character, 179–183; in Lucas’s profile, 184–185; neighborhood as signifier in, 186–187; reputation based on, 1–2; revisioning of VanDerZee in, 160–164; sites of memory in, 17, 159–160. See also American Gangster; “Harlemworld”; history films; Hoodlum; Jungle Fever; Malcolm X Nothing Personal (photo-text), 100–101, 104 Notland, Clark, 34 Notorious B.I.G. (musician), 157 nouvelle vague (French New Wave), 115, 117, 128 Nugent, Richard Bruce, 56, 60, 61, 209n27 numbers racket: Hoodlum’s depiction of, 172–177; McKay’s description of, 78; Micheaux’s films referencing, 211n63; sound-era race film and, 68, 72–73; urban black experience linked to, 78–83; white mobsters’ attempt to control, 172–175, 183–184, 226nn43–45. See also Johnson, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Nunn, Bill, 151, 153 Office of War Information (OWI), 87, 93–94 Olympia (1938), 93 One Large Evening (1914), 62–63, 70, 209n34, 209–210n35 Opportunity (magazine), 57–59, 78, 226n49. See also Johnson, Charles S.; Urban League Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU), 219n5 organized crime: charity activities of, 75; depicted as business, 77–79; white mobsters, as influence in Harlem, 80–81, 172–175, 183–184, 226nn43–45. See also crime films; gangsta (gang member, gangster); numbers racket; urban crime and criminality; specific crime figures Orion Pictures, 140 Osborn, Frederick, 93–94 Osofsky, Gilbert, 206n84 OWI (Office of War Information), 87, 93–94 Pace, Judy, 129 Pacino, Al, 155 Painter, Nell Irvin, 168, 225n39 Palti, Marion, 215n30 Pan-African Congress, 58 Paradise in Harlem (1939), 70, 82 Paramount Pictures, 221n23 Paris Exposition (1900), Du Bois’s African American portrait albums in, 5, 6, 34–39, 37, 38, 41, 193, 204n48 Park, Robert, 99 Parks, Gordon, Jr., 139. See also Super Fly (1972) Parks, Gordon, Sr.: documentary filmmaking of, 215n29; Ellison’s project with, 101–102; works: Diary of a Harlem Family, 215n29; “Harlem Gang Leader,” 111, 112, 113–114; Voices in the Mirror, 111. See also Shaft (1971) Payne, Allen, 152

INDEX

Payton, Philip A., Jr. See Afro-American Realty Company Pelatowski, Theodore, 100 Penn, Arthur, 129 Pennebaker, D. A., 115, 117, 217n72 Peoples, Raymond, 152 People’s Voice (newspaper), 85 Perl, Arnold, 104, 165–166, 216n41, 224n17, 224n19 La permission/The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968), 128–129, 218n89 Petrie, Dan, 122, 141 Petry, Ann, 116, 124 Peyton Place (1957), 217n66 Phagan, Mary, 73 “Photographs of Children” (exhibition), 106, 107 photography: Harlem as text in, 94–97, 98; indexicality of image in, 98; as language for reading black subjects, 34; mimicry and inversion in, 35–37, 37, 38; postwar Harlem examples of, 88–94, 89, 90, 91; pre-WWII context of, 4–7; sites of memory in, 17, 159–160; of urban black people on the street (vs. in the studio), 84–86. See also daguerreotypes; documentary photography; photo-text; portrait photography photojournalism, invented, 84–85 photo-text: Baldwin’s projects as, 100–101; The Cool World influenced by, 119–123, 121; Ellison’s project as, 101–102; emergence of, 94–95; experimental film influenced by, 115‒116; film in relation to, 98–99, 103–106; “Harlem Document” as, 95–97, 98; Hughes’s approach to, 102–103; as moving image, 105–110; Parks’s “Harlem Gang Leader” as, 111, 112, 113–114; on social unrest, 127–128; Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices as, 99–100 phrenology, 31–32, 40, 41 The Pickaninny Dance (1894), 6, 42 Pickett, Bill, 200–201n23 Plantation school films, 8–9, 103 Plantation school literature, 6 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 23 Politico (online magazine), 228n78 politics, African American: Brooklyn as new center of, 228n78; events marking shift in (1917 and 1919), 52–53; gangster film as perspective on, 82; pre-WWII context of, 4–7; “problem of the white man” in, 125; site of definition and debate in, 2; tensions over direct action and cultural nationalism vs. assimilation rhetoric, 128–129; Washington and Du Bois differences over, 5, 23–24, 27, 67 Polt, Harriet R., 124 polyphony, 163–164 Popkin, Harry M., 68, 76 Popkin, Leo, 68, 76 popular entertainments: black bourgeoisie’s vs. migrants’ responses to, 43–45; black preferences in, 28–31; performance mode

243

and identity in, 40–41; segregation of venues, 44. See also clubs and ballrooms; blackface; minstrelsy; vaudeville theater Portrait of Jason (1967), 118 portrait photography: Avedon’s fashionfocused, 100; background details in, 36–37, 38; Benjamin on, 205n52; Du Bois’s African American portraits considered, 34–39, 37, 38, 41, 193, 204n48; early filmmaking linked to, 8; New Negro identity linked to, 5, 6; personhood affirmed in, 205n52; Smith brothers’ work in, 85; as truth- and storytelling device, 39; use and meaning of, 10 portraits: ideal “types” in, 31–32, 32, 33; Reiss’s typology of, 58, 207–208n14. See also portrait photography Pound, Ezra, 103 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 85 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr., 7, 45, 55 Powell, James, 126–127 Price, Bruce, 145 Primary (1960), 115 Production Code Administration, 80, 129 Prohibition: crime, bootlegging, and entertainments in, 59–60; end of, 74; New Jack City linked to, 153–155. See also gangster films property ownership. See real estate development Pryor, Richard, 139 Public Enemy (hip hop group), 184 The Public Enemy (1931), 69, 154 Puck (magazine), 205n61 The Quiet One (1948): approach to, 13–15; Attie’s photographs and, 195; collaboration in, 95, 107; The Cool World compared with, 119, 120; documentary and fictional modes in, 107–108; ghetto vs. school spaces of, 108–110; still, 110 Quinones, George “Lee,” 139 race: cynosures of, 31–39, 50; hierarchies of, 31–32, 34–35, 40, 94 race film industry: decline of, 14, 84, 86–87; development of gangster films in, 75–83. See also Lincoln Motion Picture Company; Micheaux, Oscar; Micheaux Film Company; Norman Film Manufacturing Company race films: approach to, 12–13; The Cool World influenced by, 119; double consciousness in viewing, 56–57; popular subject matter of, 8–9; sound introduced to, 68, 72–73; The Sport of the Gods screen adaptation as, 203n37; The Sweet Flypaper of Life linked to, 102; textbook of, 34; themes continued in experimental film, 115‒116. See also crime films; gangster films; specific film titles race men. See American Gangster (2007); Holstein, Casper; Hoodlum (1997); Johnson, Ellsworth “Bumpy”; Lucas, Frank

244

INDEX

race riots: social and economic context of, 52–53, 214n4; specific: Harlem (1935), 74–75, 81, 92, 109; Harlem (1964), 126–127, 219n1, 219n3; Tenderloin (1900), 48. See also Harlem Riot (1943) racial segregation, 2–3, 44, 54, 92–93 racial violence: miscegenation linked to, 142–143; reversal of, 136; silent protest march against, 51, 52, 52–53, 54; urban migration linked to, 30, 55. See also lynching; race riots; urban crime and criminality Raft, George, 154 A Rage in Harlem (1991), 164, 177 The Railroad Porter (1913), 7 A Raisin in the Sun (1961), 122 Randol, George, 76 rap music, 150, 157 Ray, Man, 60 Reaganomics, 153–154, 157 real estate development: advertising of, 2–3, 26, 45, 46, 157, 159, 206n82; development and gentrification since 1980s, 177–178, 186–188, 190–191; Harlem as brand, 190–191; infrastructure expansion and, 206n84; respectable families preferred in, 54–56; “Striver’s Row” (King Model Houses), 144, 144–146; success linked to, 202n16; tensions over, 1–2; uplift ideology linked to, 26. See also capitalism record companies, 140, 221n23 Reed, Carol, 154 Reet, Petite, and Gone (1947), 87 Regeneration (1923), 200–201n23 Reifenstahl, Leni, 93 Reiss, Winold, 58, 207–208n14, 208n15 Renoir, Jean, 60 Reol Productions, 68, 203n37, 210n50 representations of African Americans: approach to, 12, 16; Attie’s photographs as encompassing, 194–198; changing style and substance (1980s), 141; Ellison’s explorations of, 101–102; fiction/nonfiction tensions in, 8; genre, aesthetics, and politics in, 138; ideal “types” in, 31–32, 32, 33, 34–39, 37, 38, 41; masculinity and empowerment in, 135; preferred modes of, 6; race/mass culture/U.S. society connections in, 45; reticence concerning, 41–42, 60, 62–67, 163–164; urbanization, criminality, and citizenship in, 47–50, 70; visibility, identity, and citizenship in, 193; visibility, technology, and cultural memory in, 160. See also film; literary arts; nostalgic reconstructions of Harlem; photography; photo-text; visual arts Return to Peyton Place (1961), 217n66 Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa, 189 Rice, Lew, 175 Rice, Thomas, 40 Rich, Matty, 150 Richardson, Willis, 58 Richter, Hans, 117

Riis, Jacob, 207n91 RKO Pictures, 103 RKO-Regent Theater, 85 Roberts, Sam, 188 Robert Stigwood Organization, 221n23 Robeson, Paul, 66 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” 51, 70, 71 Robinson, Edward G., 135 Rodriguez, Yolanda, 118 Rogosin, Lionel, 117, 218n74 romance, 139–140. See also Jungle Fever (1991) Roosevelt, Eleanor, 216n51 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 92, 94–95 Roseland Ballroom, 171 Rosskam, Edwin, 99 Roth, Tim, 173 Rouch, Jean, 114‒115 Roye, Phillip, 134 Rubin, Rick, 140 Run-DMC (hip hop group), 140 Ruth, David E., 77–78, 212n76 Sack Amusement Enterprises, 211n62 Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church, 4, 54, 200n11, 229n7 Sambo and His Funny Noises (comic strip), 205n61 Sampson, Henry T., 68, 210n40 Samuel A. Kelsey (real estate firm), 199n4 Sánchez, Juan Antonio Suárez, 107 San Francisco Film Festival, 218n89 Saturday Night Fever (1977), 221n23 Savage, Augusta, 85 Savoy Ballroom, 59, 165 Scarface (1932), 69, 77, 131, 157 Scarface (1983): gangster film conventions in, 170; influential role of, 157; New Jack City’s reference to, 16, 154, 155–157 Scarface (musician), 157 Schatz, Thomas, 69 Schatzberg, Rufus, 226n44, 226n51 Schiffman, Frank, 212n66 schools: films of blacks in, 42; in Jungle Fever, 146–147, 147, 222n31. See also education; The Quiet One (1948) Schultz, Dutch: death of, 84, 169, 226n45; Hoodlum’s depiction of, 172–173, 174, 175, 176; numbers racket control and, 80, 226nn43–44 Schultz, Michael, 138–139, 140, 141 Sciorra, Annabella, 142 Scorsese, Martin, 114 Scott, Austin, 219n2 Scott, Emmett Jay, 203n40 Scott, Ridley, 179. See also American Gangster (2007) Sekula, Allan, 36, 205n52 Selznick Film Laboratories, 64 Seminole Film Producing Company, 64 Senegambian Carnival (minstrel show), 30 Sepia Cinderella (1947), 87 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), 140

INDEX

Shadows (1958), 218n75 Shadows and Sun (unproduced), 64, 210n41 Shaft (1971), 130, 131, 176, 215n29 Shakur, Tupac, 157 Sheeler, Charles, 60 Sheila E (musician), 140 She’s Gotta Have It (1986), 140, 141 Shuffle Along (1921), 57, 58, 69 Siegel, Benjamin “Bugsy,” 173 Sieving, Christopher, 116, 217n68 Silver, Tony, 139 Simmons, Russell, 140, 157 Sims, Lavery Stokes, 163 Singleton, John. See Boyz N the Hood (1991) Sisskind, Aaron, 94, 95–97, 98 Sissle, Noble, 51, 57, 58, 69 Skyscraper (1959), 117 The Slacker (1917), 210n41 Slaughter (1972), 130 slaves, daguerreotypes of, 34, 35, 36 Slaves (1969), 219n5 slums. See ghetto living Smith, Ben, 228n78 Smith, Bessie, 71 Smith, Martin. See Carter, Michael (pseud. of Martin Smith) Smith, Marvin, 84–85 Smith, Morgan, 84–85 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 34–37, 204n48 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 128 Snipes, Wesley: in Jungle Fever, 142, 144, 147; in New Jack City, 151, 153, 156 Social Darwinism, 31–32, 200n8 Social Science Research Council, 93–94 sociology, Harlem as text in, 94–97, 98 Song of the South (1946), 196 Sono Films, 103 sound: competition in developing, 8–9; introduced to race film, 68, 72–73; onlocation recordings, 114; uses of voiceover, 108 South: civil rights movement images from, 116; Du Bois’s albums depicting, 38–39; early films set in, 42–43; photo-texts on, 13, 95. See also migrants and migration Soviet Union, film project in, 102, 209n29 spatial boundaries. See urban spaces spectatorship, 40. See also popular entertainments Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 192 The Sport of the Gods (1921), 203n37 The Sport of the Gods (Dunbar): approach to, 11; leisure venues depicted in, 44; on migrant’s dreams, 20; on migrant’s living conditions, 3–4, 189; response to, 30–31; screen adaptation of, 203n37; setting, 28, 48; significance of, 27; urban blackness and space depicted in, 28–29, 56 Starrett, Jack, 130 St. Clair, Stephanie, 173, 175 Stein, Chris, 139 Stepto, Robert, 201n2

245

stereotypes of African Americans: in coon songs and shows, 40–41; in Fights of Nations, 21–22; in “watermelon-eating films,” 202–203n26. See also representations of African Americans Stewart, Jacqueline, 6, 43, 47, 202–203n26, 203n32 Stone, Andrew L., 84 Stormy Weather (1943), 84, 103, 170 Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), 150 Straight to Heaven (1939), 82, 85 Strand, Paul, 60 Strong, Edward, 226n49 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 128 Studio Museum in Harlem, 224n7. See also “Harlemworld” Style Wars (1983), 139 Sugar Hill (1993), 164 Sundance Film Festival, 220n21 Super Fly (1972), 130, 131 “Superfly.” See Lucas, Frank “Superfly” Supreme Pictures Corporation, 83, 213n88 Sur un air de Charleston (aka Charleston) (1927), 60 Survey Graphic, “Harlem Issue” (journal), 31, 58, 84, 207–208n14 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971): aesthetics and conventions in, 128–129; box office earnings, 219n8; The Cool World compared with, 120; Cotton Comes to Harlem compared with, 129–130; funding for, 218n89; mixed genres in, 131; New Jack City’s reference to, 156, 223n46 Symbol of the Unconquered (1921), 67, 211n59 Talented Tenth: black popular culture vs. ideals of, 28–31; definition of, 24; gangster hero modeled on, 174; ideal “types” of, 31–32, 32, 33, 34–39, 37, 38; as models in morality tales, 8; role in defining blackness, 189–190; urban aesthetics defined by, 25–27. See also black bourgeoisie and elite; Du Bois, W.E.B. talking pictures. See sound Tall, Tan, and Terrific (1946), 87 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 6, 32–34 Tate, Greg, 163 Taylor, Clyde, 66–67 Taylor, Monique M., 228n68 technologies: lighter, more portable cameras, 84–85, 114, 217n64. See also sound Temple, Shirley, 76 Ten Minutes to Live (1932), 72, 73 theaters: nickelodeon type, 29, 43–45; segregation of, 44; shift to films only, 212n29. See also clubs and ballrooms; movie theaters The Third Man (1949), 154 Thompson, Donald, 107–110, 110 Thurman, Wallace, 60, 61, 208–209n25 Till, Emmett, 221n27 Timbers, Veronica, 146, 147

246

INDEX

Time (magazine), 216n48 Titucut Follies (1967), 118 Toomer, Jean, 58, 208n21 Tough, Paul, 224n5 Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange, 63, 210n41 Toussaint Welcome, Ernest, 210n41 Toussaint Welcome, Jennie Louise, 210n41 Townsend, Robert, 150 A Trip to Tuskegee (1910), 64 Tucker, Ken, 157, 222n35 Turner, Lana, 101 Twentieth Century-Fox, 76 2 Live Crew (rap group), 153 Types of Mankind (ethnographic study), 34 Tyson, Cicely, 173 Ulmer, Edgar G., 213n83. See also Dark Manhattan (1939); Moon over Harlem (1939) UMEZ (Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone), 177, 187, 197 Uncle Remus’ First Visit to New York (1914), 63 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1902), 43 Underwood, Blair, 140 Underworld (1937), 211n63 United Artists, 129–130 United House of Prayer for All People, 196, 229n7 United Press International, 219n2 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 56, 173, 226n46 Universal Pictures, 221n23 uplift ideology: Black Caesar’s ending in context of, 137; contradictions in, 26–27; Du Boisian framework for, 25–26; film’s potential for, 7, 9–10, 45, 62; gangster films in context of, 13, 79–80; interwar films reflecting, 85–86; Jungle Fever as modern-day example of, 16; Micheaux’s films as problematizing, 65–67; race film’s turn from, 68; urban dangers vs., 28–31; urbanization linked to, 23–25 Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ), 177, 187, 197 urban aesthetics: approach to, 12–13; context of, 51–54; definition of, 25–27; development of, 56–61; in early film, 62–67; film as model of, 141; in gangster films, 76–83; New Jack City’s references to, 152–153. See also aesthetics; representations urban crime and criminality: approach to, 13–15; Clarke’s The Cool World about, 115–125, 121; early films on, 12, 65; Fights of Nations’s construction of, 47, 49–50; Harlem Stirs (photo-text) on, 127–128; Lucas profiled in New York and, 178–179, 180, 181, 184–185, 189; Micheaux’s films and, 70, 72–74, 76, 211n63; New Jack City’s references to, 152–154; Parks’s “Harlem Gang Leader” on, 111, 112, 113–114; photo-text depictions of, 13–14. See also

crime films; Fights of Nations (1907); gangsta (gang member, gangster); gangster films; gangster films, African American; organized crime; The Quiet One (1948); specific criminals urbanization: approach to, 11; gangster films linked to, 69–70; historical context of, 2–3; of minstrel show, 40–41; selfevaluation of, 93; uplift ideology linked to, 23–25. See also industrialization; migrants and migration; real estate development Urban League, 26, 56. See also Opportunity urban spaces: architectural interaction with, 163; in blaxploitation films, 130–131, 138–139; class differences in, 43–45; crime films’ topography of, 49–50; cultural and political redefinition in, 22; Du Bois and environmental determinism on, 25–26; excluded from Du Bois’s albums, 38; gangster films tied to, 69–75; in Jungle Fever, 16, 142, 143–149, 144, 147; in Jungle Fever vs. Malcolm X, 172; New Negro vs. “Old Negro” in, 26–27; nostalgic depictions of, 176–177; photo-text of, 94–97, 98; racialization of boundaries, 23; in The Sport of the Gods, 28–29; strategies for avoiding vice in, 202n12; uplift ideology and dangers of, 28–31. See also Black Caesar (1973); ghetto living; nostalgic reconstructions of Harlem U.S. military: films of blacks in, 42; Harlem Hell-Fighters (369th Infantry Regiment) in, 51–54, 53; Information and Education Unit (army), 93–94, 214n5; segregation of, 54. See also The Negro Soldier U.S. Office of War Information (OWI), 87, 93–94 U.S. Supreme Court, 23, 102 VanDerZee, James: Claiborne photograph as revisioning, 160–163, 161; “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition of, 214n8; Harlem Renaissance and, 84, 214n8; Hoodlum’s Bumpy as subject of, 176; move to Harlem, 56; pictorial conventions of, 39, 45; quoted, 17; sister of, 210n41 Van Dyke, Willard, 117, 217n72 Van Peebles, Mario, 151. See also New Jack City (1991) Van Peebles, Melvin, 120, 129, 139, 218n89. See also La permission/The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968); Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) Van Vechten, Carl, 57, 59, 117 vaudeville theater: early film influenced by, 6, 7, 11–12, 41, 62, 69; featured in films, 72–73; short films featuring black actors from, 42 Venice Film Festival, 124, 217n65 Vertov, Dziga, 61, 100, 115 Vibe (magazine), 160–163, 161, 164, 223n4 Village Voice (newspaper), 151

INDEX

visual arts: docudrama on graffiti as, 139–140; film as secondary in, 41–42, 62–67, 163–164; Harlem Types (drawings), 58, 207–208n14, 208n15; historical precursors in, 31–39. See also film; photography; photo-text Vogel, Amos, 117 Vogue (magazine), 101 Voice of the Negro (magazine): editor’s stance and readership, 203n40; ideal “types” in, 6, 31–32, 32, 33 Volstead Act (1933), 74. See also Prohibition Wade, F. A., 62 Wade, G. K., 62 Walcott, Joe, 63 Waldren, Mal, 123 Walker, George, 29, 30, 41 Wallace, George, 101 Wallis, Brian, 205n52 Walrond, Eric, 60 Walton, Lester A.: on film, 7, 45, 64; on Micheaux’s films, 65, 67; on One Large Evening, 63, 209n34, 209–210n35 Warner Bros., 68–69, 140 Warshow, Robert, 174 Warwick, Dionne, 219n5 Washington, Booker T.: agrarian homemaker ideal of, 28; “Atlanta Compromise” of, 23; Du Bois on, 24, 201n4; on Dunbar, 30; folk culture interests of, 33; hopes for Voice of the Negro, 203n40; A New Negro for a New Century, 5; political stance of, 5, 23, 67; preferences in representation, 8; real estate concerns of, 3; school curricula and, 42 Washington, Denzel: in American Gangster, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 190; in Malcolm X, 167 Watermelon Man (1970), 218n89 The Watermelon Patch (1905), 43 Waters, Ethel, 71 Way Down South (1939), 102 Webb, Veronica, 145 Welles, Orson, 103 Wellman, William A., 69, 154 Wessell, Henry, 70 western films, listed, 200–201n23 West Indies: Harlem numbers racket and, 78; migrants from, 55; numbers queen from, 173 What Happened in a Tunnel (1903), 42–43 Whipper, Leigh, 64, 210n41 White, Walter, 58, 59, 93, 208–209n25 white organized crime. See organized crime whites: black actors replaced with, 42–43; Harlem depicted by, 57, 59 (see also specific authors); popular images of black inferiority for, 40–42, 44, 205n61 Whitman, Walt, 60 Wilbekin, Emil, 223n4 Wilcox, Izinetta, 80, 83 Wild Style (1983), 139–140, 220n21 Williams, Bert, 29, 30, 41, 79

247

Williams, Clarence, III, 177, 178 Williams, Fannie Barrier, 5 Williams, Timothy, 187–188 Williams, Tony, 135 Williams, Vanessa, 173 Williamson, Fred “The Hammer,” 131, 132, 137, 220n14 Willis, Deborah, 34 Wilson, Mabel O., 163, 224n11 Wiltwyck School for Boys, 216n51; film about (see The Quiet One) Wirth, Louis, 99 Wiseman, Frederick, 118, 217n72 Within Our Gates (1920), 65, 67 The Wiz (1978), 221n23 Wonder, Stevie, 143, 148 Wood, N. B., 5 Woodson, Carter G., 85 World’s Fair (Brussels, 1958), 117 World War I: Harlem Hell-Fighters in, 51–54, 53; migration in aftermath of, 55–56 World War II: decline of filmmaking in, 86–87; employment opportunities in, 92–93; orientation film for soldiers in, 93–94 Worth, Martin, 165–166, 224n17 WPA Guide to New York, 98 Wright, Richard: audience familiarity with, 124; documentary photography and, 14; film projects of, 103‒105; Haiti trip of, 215n37; on Levitt, 106, 107; works: The Last Flight, 103; Melody Limited, 103; Native Son, 96, 103, 215n36; 12 Million Black Voices, 99–100 Wright, Thomas Lee, 150–151, 152 X, Malcolm: assassination of, 219n5; experiences in Harlem, 165, 189; on movies, 170–171; photograph of, 101; words in Harlem Stirs, 128. See also The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Malcolm X (1972); Malcolm X (1992) YMCA education campaigns, 26 Young Boys Incorporated (YBI), 152 young males, African American: Attie’s photographs of, 194, 196, 198; film about school for troubled boys, 107–110, 110, 216n51; killed for rumor about interracial relationship, 142–143, 221n27, 221–222n28; labeled as problem, 97, 98, 111; police brutality against, 126–127; riot-related photographs of, 88–90, 89, 90, 91; Wright’s photo-text project on, 98–99. See also children; juvenile delinquents; New Jack cinema Zaillian, Stephen, 179. See also American Gangster (2007) Zealy, J. T., 34, 35, 36 “zip coon” character, 40–41 zoot suiter, Malcolm Little as, 167 Zunser, Jesse, 83, 210n51

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PAULA J. MASSOOD is a professor of film studies in the Department of Film

at the City University of New York and is on the doctoral faculty for the Program in Theatre at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (2003) and editor of The Spike Lee Reader (2008).