Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?: Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era 9781479866915

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Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?

Culture, Labor, History Series General Editors: Daniel Bender and Kimberley L. Phillips The Forests Gave Way before Them: The Impact of African Workers on the Anglo-American World, 1650–1850 Frederick C. Knight Unknown Class: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present Mark Pittenger Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940 Michael D. Innis-Jiménez Fueling the Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country Andrew B. Arnold A Great Conspiracy against Our Race: Italian Immigrant Newspapers and the Construction of Whiteness in the Early 20th Century Peter G. Vellon Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph Edited by Andrew E. Kersten and Clarence Lang Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism Edited by Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipman Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era Shannon King

Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era Shannon King

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2015 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ISBN: 978-1-4798-1127-4 For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress. New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

In memory of my mother and my grandaunt

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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1 The Making of the Negro Mecca: Harlem and the Struggle for Community Rights

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2 “Not to Save the Union but to ‘Free the Slaves’”: Black Labor Activism and Community Politics during the New Negro Era

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3 “Colored People Have Few Places to Which They Can Move”: Tenants, Landlords, and Community Mobilization

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4 “Maintaining ‘a High Class of Respectability’ in Negro Neighborhoods”: Contestation and Congregation in Harlem’s Geography of Vice and Leisure during the Prohibition Era

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5 “Demand the Dismissal of Policemen Who Abuse the Privileges of Their Uniform”: Racial Violence, Police Brutality, and Self-Protection

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Select Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

This book, in many ways, is both a work of autobiography and one of scholarship. It emerged, in part, from my own nostalgia, my grappling with and grasping for a past long gone, a past that includes my family and friends in Harlem whom I left behind, my beautiful mother, Jean Cooper, who passed away more than three decades ago, and Rosamond Ketcham, my grandaunt, a widow and nearly retired, who graciously took me into her two-bedroom apartment in the South Bronx and raised me as her own. Aunt Rose passed away in July 2014. Those reminiscences prompted me to reconcile my own late-twentieth-century experiences and personal history in Harlem with the early history of black Harlem, particularly its cultural and intellectual history. This book is my attempt to make sense of those historical tensions. Without the intellectual, collegial, and emotional support of many people and institutions, the completion of this book would not have been possible. I am deeply grateful to Nicole Fleetwood, Steven G. Fullwood, Jennifer Graber, and Melaine Thompson for getting me over the first hurdle of recommitting to and rewriting the book when I lost a full draft of the manuscript several years ago. When I was prepared to give up, you helped me through that knotty moment. I would like to thank the Department of History at SUNY Binghamton, particularly Nancy Appelbaum, Elisa Camiscioli, Bonnie Effros, Sarah Elbert, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Jean Quataert; and my colleagues Phyllis Amenda, Sarah Boyle, Axel Bertamini Corluyan, Jennifer Cubic, Denise Lynn, Laura Murphy, Dmitri and Kara Palmateer, and Ivette M. Rivera-Giusti. To Tiffany R. Patterson, many thanks for your mentorship and continued encouragement; scholars Melvyn Dubofsky, Ricardo Laremont, and Michael O. West, provided me with sage advice and guidance. At Binghamton, I had the opportunity to share my work with and receive feedback from an array of scholars from several academic departments and programs, particularly those attached to the Department of Sociology and the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations: Rigo Andino, Peter Carlo Becerra, Michael Calderon-Zaks, Ruben Chandrasekar, Vik Chaubey, Lena Delgado de Torres, Karen Gagne, Tu Huynh, Gladys Jiménezix

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Munoz, Williams G. Martin, Lindah M’hando, Wazir Mohamed, Frank Ruiz, Kelvin Santiago-Valles, Vandana Swami, Daryl Thomas, Dale Tomich, Nigel Westmaas and Richard Yidana. The Schomburg Center for Black Research Scholars-in-Residence Program has played a pivotal role in my development as a scholar and a historian. Diana Lachatanere, words fail to express my deep appreciation and profound respect for you and your management of the scholars’ program; you are a beacon of inspiration for the fellows and the program alike. Colin Palmer, as the director of the center’s scholars program, you created a wonderful environment for the fellows; we presented our work, engaged in robust debate, and received and gave feedback, but more than that, we shared laughter, ate together, and created community. I benefitted from the brilliance of Johanna Fernandez, Nicole Fleetwood, Venus Green, Kali N. Gross, Malinda Lindquist, Ivor Miller, Robert O’Meally, Evie Shockley, and Chad L. Williams, who were also fellows. The center was not only a research institution but also, and always, a home away from home. It has been an honor to work with and be in the company of the directors and staff of each division, particularly the late André Elizée, Sharon Howard, Mary Yearwood, and John Thompson, as well as the security staff, maintenance workers, and the volunteers who daily make the center both one of the world’s finest repositories for research on black culture and a neighborhood epicenter of culture and politics for denizens of Harlem and New York City. The book project would not have been possible without the knowledge and generosity of the librarians and archivists at Binghamton University, the College of Wooster, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University, the Library of Congress Reading Room, New York City’s Municipal Archives, the New York Public Library, both the Schomburg Center and the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, and the University of Oregon. I want to thank Clara Platter, Constance Grady, and Dorothea S. Halliday at New York University Press, and Culture, Labor, History series editors Daniel Bender and Kimberley Phillips. Kimberley, I am grateful for your longstanding support and your many readings and great feedback on the manuscript. I am also indebted to the two anonymous reviewers who read the book and offered many insightful suggestions. At the College of Wooster, I have been blessed to be in perhaps the most collegial department on the planet. From the start, the Department of History has shown me what it means to be a colleague, a member of a department, and an exemplary teacher. At least once a week, I have walked into each of

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your offices asking for advice, and each of you has always had or made time for me. Hayden Schilling, I really appreciate your mentorship, and your always asking me about myself and, of course, the book. Kabria Baumgartner, thank you for reading a chapter and sections of the book; I have often returned to your comments. I am also grateful for the many festive times I’ve shared with my colleagues in Kauke Hall and across campus: Christa Craven, Amber Garcia, Raymond Gunn, Matthew Krain, Susan Lee, Lee McBride, Philip Mellizo, Leah Mirakhor, Amyaz Moledina, Charles Peterson, Ibra Sene, Tom Tiernay, and Leslie Wingard; you all have in different ways, helped me keep my life in perspective by reminding me that it was okay, often with a cultural event, spirits or sport, to focus on other things besides the book. In addition to mentorship and overall support, the College of Wooster also provided several subventions for research, travel, and writing, including the Ralston Endowment Fund for Faculty Development and the Henry Luce III Fund for Distinguished Scholarship. I also want to thank several scholars who have provided support as readers, mentors, or peer-mentors: Davarian Baldwin, Dexter Blackman, Tammy Brown, Amrita Myers Chakrabarti, Marc C. Goulding, Michael HamesGarcia, LaShawn D. Harris, Cheryl Hicks, Laura W. Hill, Hasan Jeffries, Randal Jelks, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie, Clarence Lang, Minkah Makalani, Charles McKinney, Jessica Millward, Irmary Reyes-Santos, the late Peggy Pascoe, Chris Tinson, Michael O. West, and Kidada Williams. Christina Lux thank you for suggesting the book title, and reintroducing me to James Baldwin’s essay “Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?” Tiffany M. Gill, my book mentor, a.k.a. “the book whisperer,” you reminded me why I started the book in the first place. Through your close reading of the manuscript, you keenly grasped what I struggled to see—how the black women and men I’ve written about are inextricably connected to my own experiences and community in Harlem and how those local people are legitimate subjects for historical writing. That inspiration propelled me to the finish line. From the very beginning, my friends’ and family’s support have been inestimable. I want to thank Nikki Calliste, Charles Peterson and Meredith M. Gadsby, Timothy Johnson, Marika Reid-Virgo, Kiminey Thomas, Grant and Eva Vega-Olds, and Janelle White-Jones. To my godmother, Lucy Douglass, I deeply appreciate your unwavering support for and abiding faith in me. Since graduate school, Alicia B. Williams, Kamau and Lisa Sennaar, Jamal Ketcham, and Malik and Evelyn Fernandez-Ketcham have been my foundation. Family time with you—at karate practice, the swimming pool, basketball games, or just talking about race, politics, and culture have kept me grounded, comforted, and loved. Thank you.

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Introduction Around 123rd Street, an enormous luxury high-rise is going up. The people of the neighborhood have scrawled, in white paint, on the walls of the construction site: Where will we live? For Harlem is an exceedingly valuable chunk of real estate and the state and the city and the real-estate interests are reclaiming the land and urban renewalizing—or gentrifying—the niggers out of it. —James Baldwin, “Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?” 1986

In the summer of 1900, a race riot in the Tenderloin district of New York City set the tone for the relationships among blacks, whites, and the police in Harlem and the city at large for the remainder of the twentieth century. On August 12, at Forty-First Street and Eighth Avenue, police officer Robert J. Thorpe, in civilian clothes, attempted to arrest May Enoch, a black woman, he believed to be “soliciting.”1 Arthur Harris, her common-law husband, ran to her aid, unaware that the white aggressor was a policeman. Officer Thorpe struck Harris with a club, and Harris retaliated with a penknife, fatally wounding Thorpe. On August 15 and then the following day (the day of Thorpe’s funeral), police and white gangs wreaked havoc on black populated streets and passersby throughout the Tenderloin district. These white mobs—comprised of civilians and police officers—attacked black pedestrians from Thirty-Fourth Street to Forty-Second Street along Broadway, Seventh, and Eighth Avenues. “They [police] ran with the crowds in pursuit of their prey; they took defenseless men who ran to them for protection and threw them to the rioters, and in many cases they beat and clubbed men and women more brutally than the mob did,” noted Frank Moss, who compiled a report of the riot.2 Many blacks promptly armed themselves; the black elite trusting to a more pacific approach, formed the Citizens’ Protective League. The CPL requested Mayor Robert A. Van Wyck’s protection and cooperation, and he authorized the Police Board to investigate the police department. The Police Board only legitimized its officers’ actions. In each case, the state—the police, the mayor, and the police board—failed to protect black citizens’ rights. As Moss explained bluntly, “the ‘investigation’ was a palpable sham.”3 White civilians and the police doubly attacked the black community during the 1900 racial conflagration. None1

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theless, the 1901 police report stated that the police’s “prompt and vigorous action . . . kept the situation under control.”4 In New York City, the police and white dailies invariably incriminated the black community, legitimating the targeting of blacks as well as police aggression.5 Black New Yorkers’ violent encounters with civilian and police violence during the race riot of 1900, as well as entrenched overcrowding and landlord exploitation in the Tenderloin and then San Juan Hill, engendered the migration to Harlem. In 1986, a year before he died, James Baldwin, Harlem native and expatriate writer explained that he was “in distress—but not in despair.” His beloved Harlem was undergoing, again, a physical and demographic transformation wrought by rapid increases in real estate property values and rent. Harlemites’ response to gentrification in the late 1980s mirrored the initial black hegira to Harlem more than eight decades before—exhibiting blacks’ self-determination and dedication to creating and maintaining control over their community. Black people have always been fighting for Harlem. That they comprised the majority of the neighborhood’s residents never precluded whites from contesting blacks’ proprietary claim on the neighborhood. Despite white control over Harlem residential and commercial real estate then and now, blacks have persistently demanded that their community rights take priority. As Baldwin opined, “black people” sustained a resiliency and an integrity that “managed to survive White sympathy.” While blacks queried where they would live, Baldwin argued that the “question is as old as our presence here, and every generation has had to deal with it.” As if writing to himself, he asserted “each generation has had to look out on this dangerous and lonely place and try to invest it with coherence—striving to make it my home.” This tradition of black New Yorkers investing the neighborhood of Harlem with coherence began in the early twentieth century in the aftermath of the race riot of 1900.6 In the pages that follow, I tell the story of black politics and community rights in Harlem during the New Negro era. Between the turn of the twentieth century and the Great Depression, as Harlem transformed from a white to a black neighborhood, I argue, black’s grassroots activism around local issues challenged various manifestations of racial injustice and raised the racial and political consciousness of the black community.7 While blacks agreed with the claim that Harlem belonged to them, they often disagreed about whose vision of Harlem should take precedence—in ways that contributed to intraracial conflict as well as racial solidarity. Harlem grassroots activism, which consisted of neighborhood campaigns, fleeting alliances, and debates held on the streets and in the district’s major black weeklies and New Negro journals, expanded and invigorated the black public sphere. By the Great Depression,

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Harlemites had forged a dynamic political culture and infrastructure from which they launched a mass protest movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Since the 1980s, historians of the urban North have effectively demonstrated that blacks built communities rather than ghettoes during the first three decades of the twentieth century and, more significantly, that the black working class and its mainly southern culture shaped not only the community-building process but also black labor campaigns to desegregate industrial labor markets and trade unions during the 1930s and 1940s.8 While Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?, like much of the recent scholarship, foregrounds the political agency of the black community, this book also situates community formation within the context of northern racism. In so doing, I endeavor to draw a balance between the salience of everyday and institutionalized forms of white supremacy and human agency that the communitybuilding model employs. To do this, I also build on recent work on black New York and the urban North that has complicated our understanding of racial violence, crime, and social reform during the period before Great Depression. This scholarship has helped me understand the cultural and social world that black migrants confronted as they aspired to build their lives anew in the North; collectively, this scholarship demonstrates how the police and the carceral state criminalized black women and men in both popular culture and social science scholarship, barred them from preventive institutions and welfare agencies, and targeted and brutalized them in public and private urban spaces. This project zeroes in on the prominence of white racial violence and police violence as part of the everyday experience of Harlemites, and how the black community responded to these civilian and state-sanctioned forms of ordinary violence over the course of time.9 Black politics in the urban North, especially Harlem, generally revolved around the emergence of the New Negro movement—symbolized by the radical journalism and labor activism of socialist and labor leader A. Phillip Randolph and the black nationalism and Pan Africanism of Marcus Garvey— during and after the Great War. The New Negro movement represented a shift from the ideas and politics of “Old Negro” leaders, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.10 According to this “grand narrative” of the New Negro movement, by the early 1920s, New Negro politics declined as civil rights organizations redirected their attention to cultivating black arts and letters in what would become the Negro Renaissance. In the last decade or so, scholars have situated the New Negro movement and cultural politics outside of Harlem. This new research agenda has signaled a departure from what I call New York exceptionalism—the proposition that the city of New York and the neighborhood of Harlem were the epicenter of black intellec-

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tual and cultural politics. These historians tell the stories of New Negroes in Chicago, Elaine, Arkansas, Paris, and London, and more specifically of Garveyites in the rural and urban South. This scholarship persuasively demonstrates that Harlem neither represented nor harbored the whole of the political and cultural activities comprising the Negro Renaissance and the New Negro movement.11 Whose Harlem? similarly centers on community building and challenges New York exceptionalism. By foregrounding “local people” and neighborhood issues, this book alters the chronology of black politics in the urban North in the twentieth century. First, this work situates the beginning of Harlem’s political history before the Great Migration and the Great War, thereby locating Harlem politics in the specificity of community formation. Black community rights began with black New Yorkers’ efforts to transform the neighborhood of Harlem into a black metropolis in the aftermath of the 1900 race riot in the Tenderloin. Second, this work expands the spectrum of black politics beyond the organizational and discursive politics of Garvey, Randolph, and other intellectuals and artists usually associated with the New Negro movement. Thus, this book demonstrates not only that Harlemites engaged in racial consciousness-raising political activity before World War I, but also that they built upon the New Negro politics in urban and social spaces during and after the war. Whose Harlem? spotlights black grassroots activism around local issues—work and unionization, high rents and housing conditions, leisure life and vice activity, and police brutality and self-defense; it also maps the development of blacks’ efforts to establish their community rights during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By situating Harlem’s political history in black struggles for racial autonomy and broadening the range of black political activity before the Great Depression, this book sheds light on the making of the black freedom movement in the North in the early twentieth century. Historians have explained the emergence of black mass protest in the 1930s and 1940s as either an outgrowth of New Negro activism during and after World War I or in terms of the political opportunities that the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the New Deal created for black communities and black activists in the North. However, this scholarship has yet to explicate the incongruence between the organizational and discursive politics of the New Negro intellectuals and the coalition-oriented and collective action-based politics of the black community during the Depression and World War II eras. Whose Harlem? demonstrates how black activism for community rights in the first three decades of the twentieth century formed a political infrastructure, giving rise to a black politics anchored in black institutions and receptive to forging coali-

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tions across the political spectrum. By the 1930s, “new crowd” black activists, as historian Beth Bates has detailed, had begun to employ more aggressive forms of protests, such as labor strikes, and in black metropolises across the urban North, mobilized black communities boycotted local white-owned establishments that refused to employ blacks and waged rent strikes to challenge exploitive landlords. While these various forms of black protest were on a larger scale and more sustained than ever before, they were “predicated,” as sociologist Charles Payne describes the organizing tradition in Greenwood, Mississippi, “on the activism of an earlier, socially invisible generation” that came of age in Harlem before the Great Depression.12

Community Rights and Community Politics Harlem grassroots activism emerged from blacks’ endeavors to realize their community rights. In this study, I conceptualize community rights as the community ideals, expectations, and objectives that blacks held for Harlem. While the struggle for community rights represented a form of grassroots activism, it was not a full-fledged social movement. Rather, it was a goal-oriented movement that belonged to what civil rights activist Bob Moses described as a community-organizing tradition, which served the purpose of long-term community development and community control.13 Moses identified another tradition, as well—the community-mobilizing tradition—and Whose Harlem? seeks to delineate the process by which blacks transitioned from community organizing to community mobilizing. Paraphrasing Moses, Payne writes, the latter “focused on large-scale, relatively short-term public events. This is the tradition of Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington, the tradition best symbolized by the work of Martin Luther King.” In that sense, community rights activism can be distinguished from northern civil rights activism, broadly understood as a movement to effect antidiscrimination legislation in the arenas of housing, employment, education, and the like. During the period under study, from 1900 to the Great Depression, Harlemites’ strivings for community rights were often an expression of New Negro politics. Community rights was both a discursive formation and an assembly of political acts, articulating black self-determination as a measure of the black community’s aspirations for racial and neighborhood autonomy. Yet as historian Davarian Baldwin notes, “not every individual [or political act] . . . embodied the ideals of the New Negro.”14 The politics of respectability, for example, operating sometimes as a form of community discipline, was rooted in antiracist and self-determinative sensibilities. Community politics, on the other hand, refers to the aggregate of blacks’ individual and collective struggles

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for both “socially meaningful power” and community rights in Harlem and around the city. Harlem community politics represents the combined ways, as historian Robin D. G. Kelley writes, that “black working people struggled and survived without direct links to” established organizations, as well as how New Negro activists, neighborhood organizations, and reformers influenced the social, political, and economic conditions of the black community.15 Whose Harlem? considers individual, collective, and organized forms of political activity by focusing on the range of blacks’ responses to neighborhood issues. Hence, this work pays close attention to the ways that black institutions, black occupied spaces, and public and private spaces function as sites of contestation and consciousness raising as a means for understanding New Negro politics in urban and social spaces. In different ways, the often segregated spaces of black institutions and urban life contributed to the making of an oppositional consciousness—that is, according to sociologists Aldon Morris and Naomi Braine, a mental state that “prepares members of an oppressed group to act to undermine, reform or overthrow a system of human domination.” Black oppositional consciousness, I argue, developed in public and private spaces as well as in agency-laden institutions, which Morris defines as “those institutions, often long-standing, developed by potential challenging groups that house cultural and organizational resources that can be mobilized to launch collective action.” Collectively these semi-autonomous institutions, such as churches, reform agencies, and even cultural and leisure spaces like nightclubs and speakeasies, reinforced and restored black humanity.16 Black interracial and intraracial conflict often revolved around contests over the control of public and private space within and outside of Harlem. Harlemites used the streets, apartments, restaurants, theaters, and other spaces for work and pleasure, broadening the spectrum of historical agents in black urban politics. I read the acts of movie projectionists, tenants, sex workers, passersby, and street orators, among others in public and private spaces, as “audible texts” that speak to black women’s and men’s “values, ambitions, and frustrations.”17 This approach more effectively gauges the power dynamics between the less powerful and the powerful, demonstrating especially how the powerful “interpret, refine, and respond to the thoughts and actions of the oppressed,” including black political actors unaffiliated with organizations.18 These struggles over public and private space also fueled interracial, intraracial, and ideological alliances and coalitions along gender and class lines in Harlem. Many of these alliances were fragile and short-lived; nonetheless, they played a significant role in initiating political action and establishing networks in the black community. This political dynamic foregrounds James Baldwin’s timely query—whose Harlem is this, anyway?—which rhetorically

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signifies the diversity of political activity in Harlem, the intraracial tensions that the diversity engendered, and, more significantly, the specific ways these tensions shaped black political struggles in New York City before the Great Depression.

The Making of Grassroots Activism Harlem community politics emerged in the cauldron of both interracial conflict and intraracial clashes before World War I. Harlem’s political culture was the product of community formation as well as transformations in blacks’ political consciousness engendered by local political activity. Well before they constituted the majority of the Harlem’s population, black New Yorkers and migrants had boldly claimed Harlem as their home. The grassroots struggle for community rights began immediately after the turn of the twentieth century as a steady stream of blacks searched for better housing and safer living conditions in the aftermath of the 1900 riot. Beginning around 1904, a coterie of black realtors, black tenants, and black churches waged a campaign for housing in Harlem. At the same time, black Harlemites launched a range of local initiatives to transform their new neighborhood into a black metropolis. By the 1920s, Harlem community politics had evolved into a grassroots struggle that employed a range of political tactics connected with early campaigns for community control and self-determination. At the end of the decade, these overlapping struggles against exploitive landlords and police brutality, along with community efforts to assert respectability and economic autonomy, comprised the fulcrum of Harlem’s political culture. Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, blacks remained at the bottom rung of the city’s economic ladder. By contrast with other large cities, small-scale shops dominated New York City’s industrial economy. Black New Yorkers competed against native and ethnic whites in industries that were controlled by contractors and subcontractors from the same ethnic groups and anchored in the same neighborhoods and institutional lives as their competition. Overwhelmingly disadvantaged in the labor market, black men toiled in the service and transportation sectors, and black women found jobs as domestics, garment workers, and launderers. Blacks also struggled to build successful race businesses in Harlem, where whites either refused to rent commercial spaces to blacks or charged them exorbitant rates. In spite of blacks comprising the majority of the district’s residents and consumers, whites controlled Harlem’s commercial sector. Thus, before the Great War, the black metropolis was a black consumers’ paradise where black and white proprietors competed for black patrons.

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Harlemites delighted in the black metropolis’s cabarets, saloons, theaters, and other places of public amusements.19 Much more than recreational places for dance, drink, and, sometimes, sex, these spaces for leisure pursuits empowered blacks to take back their bodies from alienating work. Blacks in Harlem found and enjoyed “congregations,” places they endowed with cultural significance and meaning. Congregation, as historian Earl Lewis describes, enabled blacks to “gather their cultural bearings to mold urban” space—to create a sense of community rooted not only in blacks’ shared experiences but also in their shared aspirations and expectations for Harlem. But Harlem’s consumer marketplace also favored black consumers. Interracial and intraracial competition among Harlem proprietors and the range of commodities and services offered politicized black patrons, bringing their consumer rights into focus and calling attention to local proprietors’ dependence on their business. These tensions between Harlemites’ consumer power and white proprietors’ commercial dominance would set the stage for black consumer and civil rights campaigns in the 1920s and beyond.20 Harlem was no refuge from white violence. As in the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill districts in 1905, so in Harlem in 1907, 1909, and 1911, blacks fiercely battled white civilians, youth gangs, and the police in the saloons and on the streets. Whether appealing to the police commissioner to intervene or arming themselves for self-protection, black New Yorkers endeavored to shield themselves and their communities from police violence. These individual and collective forms of black expression and resistance in public and private spaces triggered coordinated and organizational responses from the black community and jump-started Harlem’s social reform movement for community respectability. Concerned about the reputation and the moral fiber of the neighborhood, black spokespeople and the New York Age, the city’s major black weekly, contended that they had the community right to establish a respectable neighborhood and enforce upright public and private behavior. These endeavors for respectability emerged from late-nineteenth and early twentieth century campaigns of black ministers, reformers, and citizens, who formed uplift organizations to accommodate the expansion of the black population during the pre–World War I migration and the steady growth of the black population in Harlem. Thus along with black churches, organizations like Victoria Earle Matthews’ White Rose Mission (1897) and the National Urban League (1911), sought to equip black New Yorkers and newcomers with vocational training and welfare resources and to modify black behavior in order to ensure Harlem’s reputation as a neighborhood of respectability and law and order.

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The battle for better housing did not end with black occupation of Harlem residential spaces. Harlemites in 1916 launched a community-wide struggle for lower rents against exploitive landlords. The stream of black New Yorkers moving to Harlem before World War I became a flood of migrants coming from the South and the Caribbean during the war and significantly raised the demand for housing in a period of low residential building growth. With a surplus of renters, black and white landlords charged blacks higher rents than whites and used different methods to encourage, or sometimes to force, whites to move in order to exploit the ever-growing market of black tenants. For several winter months, black women led a housing campaign and organized tenants to decrease rents and ameliorate housing conditions. The tenants held mass meetings at local churches and schools, which had the effect of revealing the complicity of black real estate agents in the exploitation of Harlem residents. This community-wide campaign represented the culmination of Harlem’s grassroots activism during the World War I era. The 1920s saw a maturation of Harlem political culture and racial consciousness, as the black public sphere, previously led by the conservative New York Age, expanded to include a greater array of political actors and discourses. During that turbulent decade, Harlemites’ attempts to realize their community rights engendered a myriad of political struggles over labor, housing, vice activity, and police brutality. While Harlemites continued to engage in everyday resistance, they pursued more organized forms of protest and employed a wider assortment of political tactics. Before and during the war, reformist organizations like the Urban League, periodicals like the New York Age, and New Negro activists such as A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen tried to open trade unions to black workers. By the mid-1920s, black labor activists individually and jointly courted the American Federation of Labor. The New York Urban League, the New Negro socialist Frank Crosswaith, and other black labor activists formed the Trade Union Committee for the Organization for Negro Workers in 1925. Black projectionists a year later staged a strike against the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, anticipating the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the Depression era. These coordinated endeavors among neighborhood organizations, black radicals and liberals, and black weeklies represented the community’s effort both to organize Harlemites around labor issues and to leverage their consumer power to bring about community rights by pressuring white businesses to take seriously the economic aspirations of the black community. Building on wartime tenancy struggles, Harlemites participated in a citywide campaign for lower rents and political representation throughout the

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| Introduction

1920s. During the Great War, the building construction industry had redirected its resources to wartime mobilization, resulting in widespread housing shortages across the entire city. In 1919, the State of New York enacted a series of laws known as the Emergency Rent Laws to protect tenants vulnerable to rent increases after the war. Black tenants, civic organizations, and black churches organized local meetings to educate the community about the new laws and their rights as tenants. Tenants, empowered by community organizing, challenged exploitive landlords in the courts. The Harlem Tenants League, a communist front, and a cadre of black journalists and politicians in the late 1920s mobilized Harlemites to extend the Emergency Rent Laws. Through Harlem’s “vote black” efforts, led by the New York Amsterdam News, blacks voted in a slate of black Republicans to Harlem assembly districts 19 and 21, and in 1929, the assemblymen passed new housing legislation aimed at protecting their tenants. In Prohibition era New York City, cultural politics consisted of interracial and intraracial struggles over urban private and public space in Harlem. The expansion of white-controlled leisure resorts and the invasion of whites in Harlem in the mid-1920s threatened blacks’ autonomy in places of public recreation and challenged blacks’ claim that Harlem belonged to them. Both white and black proprietors rapidly reconfigured Harlem night spots, where blacks had found pleasure and cultural rejuvenation before Prohibition, for the pleasure of white consumers. Compounding this move, whites’ objectification and exoticization of black people and culture exasperated many Harlemites. As Levi Hubert, a contemporary, claimed derisively, white people’s appreciation for black creativity amounted to “the applause given to a dancing dog.”21 In an attempt to reclaim their autonomy, Harlemites refashioned residential spaces for pay, play, and pleasure. With the expansion of Harlem’s geography of vice and leisure in public and private spaces, black spokespersons—journalists, reformers, and religious leaders—targeted private and public leisure sites as a moral and an urban problem that had to be rectified to restore community respectability. Harlemites concerns about respectability were followed by blacks’ demands for ensuring the safety of their children and the privacy of their homes. Overall, blacks’ sundry and competing strategies to control black community life highlight the economic vulnerably of Harlem and obstacles black residents faced to reclaim Harlem as their own. In the aftermath of World War I, vigilance over Harlem’s black public sphere combined with individual and collective acts of self-protection exposed and challenged patterns of police brutality. While the entire community loathed the belligerence of the police, various factions within the black

Introduction

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public sphere debated about the appropriate response to the unlawful acts of police violence in the early 1920s. The New York Age treated police brutality on a case-by-case basis, while the New York Amsterdam News and New Negro activists treated it as a form of institutionalized racism. In the middle of the decade, the act of assaulting prisoners under custody to force a confession or admit guilt, known as the “third degree,” held the attention and raised the furor of Harlem’s black public sphere. Ubiquitous cases of police malfeasance, especially the failure to address blacks’ complaints about police brutality, inaugurated a rebellion against the New York Police Department in the streets of Harlem in late July 1928. This so-called “near riot” represented the confluences of blacks’ ire towards the daily and the decades’ long indignities and invectives of the police department, as well as the unending occurrences of ill treatment, economic racism, and housing exploitation they endured in Harlem and across the city. Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? is organized thematically, with each chapter covering the period from 1900 to 1930. Chapter 1 delineates the making of Harlem as a political community. Harlem’s political culture derived partly from the cultural and religious institutions of the black enclaves in the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill districts. This chapter argues that through the process of community formation, blacks’ strivings for community control before World War I gave rise to the struggle for Harlem community rights. Chapter 2 examines the roles of New York City’s political economy, labor unionism, and black labor activism in Harlem from the postwar era to the Great Depression. Chapter 3 chronicles the deterioration of Harlem tenements, and tenants’ endeavors to reduce rents and improve living conditions. The 1916 housing campaign led by black women and the black tenant movement to extend the Emergency Rent Laws in the late 1920s frame this chapter. By mapping leisure and vice activity in Harlem apartments, chapter 4 highlights the intraracial and interracial conflicts and cooperation engendered by the debate over the proper use of public and private leisure space in Harlem in the 1920s. Chapter 5 narrates the various small-scale episodes of white civil violence and police brutality in black Manhattan in general and Harlem in particular from 1900 to 1928; this chapter focuses on the range of black responses to state and civil societal violence and community debate on police brutality and the efficacy of self-defense. Throughout the 1920s, Harlemites worked together as a community to combat exploitative black realtors, unionize black projectionists, and sponsor public forums to establish their community rights. Harlem grassroots activism grew out of a defiant black public sphere and institutional and associational activism. Harlemites engaged in labor and tenant protest, community

12

| Introduction

organizing, litigation, letter-writing campaigns, and quotidian forms of resistance. Through these efforts, blacks established a community politics that challenged racial injustice in Harlem and forged a political infrastructure that was foundational for black political and radical activity throughout the 1930s and 1940s and beyond.

1

The Making of the Negro Mecca Harlem and the Struggle for Community Rights

Throughout the 1920s, black leaders in New York City and across the nation debated the cultural and intellectual significance of Harlem. As the largest urban black neighborhood in the North, ensconced in the most cosmopolitan and diverse city in the nation, Harlem, opined James Weldon Johnson, was “a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.”1 Similarly, George Edmund Haynes, cofounder of the National Urban League, envisioned Harlem as an exemplar of interracial comity. In 1921, Haynes contends, “the cosmopolitan atmosphere [of New York City] knows less of color prejudice than probably any other city in the United States.”2 While Johnson and Haynes were certainly propagandists for the exceptionalism of Harlem during the early twenties, there seemed to be some truth to these claims. In the aftermath of a global conflict and in the midst of a string of race riots punctuating black districts in the urban North, the absence of a race riot in the city since 1900 as well as the neighborhood’s burgeoning culture made Harlem the model of race relations in black America. However, in 1927, Kelly Miller, sociologist and dean of Howard University, observed that “the most gigantic instance of racial segregation in the United States [was] seen in Harlem.” Miller keenly called into question Johnson’s and Haynes’s picturesque depiction of Harlem, spotlighting the conspicuity of racial segregation, and the generally blurred line between de facto segregation and de jure segregation in the North. As he noted, “the tradition and practice of New York State is against any form of racial discrimination by law, and yet this process has gone on and still continues as effectively as if by legislative enactment.”3 A year later in late July, Harlem exploded, and New York City witnessed the district’s first race riot. While Johnson and Haynes endeavored to represent Harlem as an exception, Miller zeroed in on the district’s commonality with other black districts undergoing small and large-scale interracial conflict in the urban North. He also explained the rise of racial consciousness across the nation, contending that residential segregation incited “border skirmishes.” When Ossian Sweet, a black doctor, dared to defend his home and family in Detroit in 1925, this 13

14 | The Making of the Negro Mecca

incident, Miller claimed, was “in no sense different from hundreds of other incidents occurring all over the country, with the exception that it . . . resulted in bloodshed.” Miller’s focus on interracial conflicts around the country sheds light on the widespread battles over residential and public space across suburban and urban areas in the North and especially on the emergence of black politics from interracial strife at the local level.4 As Miller asserted, New York City was not exceptional. White supremacy and racial segregation thrived in the city “as effectively as if by legislative enactment.” This chapter delineates the making of the “Negro Mecca,” and the origins of Harlem’s movement for community rights. I argue that Harlemites’ struggles for community rights emerged from their efforts to build a black metropolis. Before World War I, Harlem’s black community underwent significant institutional development; through the mobilization of their economic and cultural resources, blacks aspired to claim the neighborhood of Harlem as their very own, stirring white resistance in the emergent black district and sundry areas in the city. By the early 1920s, Harlem unequivocally belonged to blacks. Harlemites expected their rights as members of the community to be acknowledged, and clamorously demanded racial equality and neighborhood respectability on that basis. Arranged thematically, this chapter focuses on Harlem’s community-building process, foregrounding local battles on three interconnected and overlapping fronts—housing, civil rights, and social reform; each battleground constitutes a different part of one story, the origins of Harlem community rights. While the chapter encompasses the period from 1900 to the Great Depression, the moment before the Great Migration is especially significant; at that time, blacks used their institutional resources to strengthen the campaign for housing, erase racial segregation and violence, and provide services to the ever-growing black population. Thus prior to, and in concert with, the arrival of A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, and other New Negro intellectuals and activists, Harlemites had already begun organizing the community and leveraging their institutional resources to propel the community building process. As subsequent chapters will show, New Negro community activists, organizationally and rhetorically, were often in dialogue with these earlier, but foundational, struggles for community rights. The chapter begins with the “real estate race war” and blacks’ search for housing in Harlem in the aftermath of the 1900 race riot. Over the course of roughly two decades, a network of black realtors, black churches, and black tenants took advantage of market conditions and intraracial tensions among white homeowners and renters to claim residential space in Harlem. This campaign for housing, waged from San Juan Hill and Harlem, was the first

The Making of the Negro Mecca

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15

grassroots battle in Harlem. Harlem’s early political development derived partly from religious and secular institutions transplanted from older black enclaves and partly from recently developed institutions blacks established in their new environment in Harlem. Without the presence and mobilizing efforts of these long-standing institutions in San Juan Hill and other black neighborhoods, blacks might have neither sustained the movement to Harlem nor claimed a significant portion of its residential neighborhood before World War I. As blacks settled into Harlem, they began building secular and spiritual institutions to satisfy the needs of the burgeoning community. Throughout the community-building process, black leaders asserted that black entrepreneurialism and racial consumer loyalty were the fulcra of the black community. Black Harlem, like other black metropolises in the North and the South, attempted to establish a separate economy; this form of black nationalism, influenced by Booker T. Washington, represented blacks’ efforts to achieve economic autonomy.5 Yet within Harlem’s marketplace, white proprietors also competed for and catered to black consumers. Harlemites primarily experienced the black metropolis as consumers, for many of them chose the variety of services and options that white proprietors offered them over those offered by black businesses. So while Harlem was a black metropolis, the creation of economic autonomy eluded Harlemites. Situating the community-building process in the period before World War I provides the cultural context for understanding black consumers’ responses to the “white invasion” of Harlem in the twenties. As I argue in chapter 4, during the heyday of the Prohibition era, white and black proprietors catered to the flood of white pleasure-seekers bustling in Harlem for “Negro primitivism.” With blacks’ status as preferred consumers challenged by the presence of whites, black Harlemites began to question the notion that Harlem, indeed, belonged to the black community. Nonetheless, Harlem’s array of neighborhood institutions forged a politics of dignity among the black community.6 Before Harlem drew white America’s attention in the 1920s, blacks had created semi-autonomous spaces that contributed to their sense of community belonging. These sites of relative geographical and imagined separateness were protective spaces where blacks, as historian Lynne Feldman notes, “remove[d] themselves physically and psychologically from the broader society . . . [and] constructed a community that allowed them to temporarily ignore the hostilities of the outside world.”7 Black institutions, therefore, protected the dignity of blacks, and fostered the expectation that they should be treated fairly and equitably inside and outside of Harlem. The district’s leisure and pleasure resorts were important cultural and economic sites for Harlemites to cultivate political identities that

16 |

The Making of the Negro Mecca

challenged conventional notions of race, gender, and respectability in urban space. Harlem, as a site of sociability, work, and commerce, privileged blacks who reveled in the array of diversions that the metropolis offered them.8 This politics of dignity undergirded blacks’ everyday resistance in public places outside the safety of their community. Beyond the neighborhood of Harlem, white proprietors rejected black consumers, creating a tension between black aspirations and white endeavors to circumscribe their civil rights. As historian Robin D. G. Kelley and others have demonstrated, public places were often sites of contestation and politicization. Harlem’s civil rights struggles grew out of black consumerism and blacks’ flagrant occupation of public space in Harlem and around the city. Blacks’ consumer expectations collided with whites’ efforts to constrain blacks’ civil rights in theaters, restaurants, and public transportation. Harlem’s civil rights movement emerged from blacks’ everyday responses to de facto segregation rather than from the efforts of civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909). Despite being headquartered in New York City, the NAACP played a marginal role in local civil rights matters. The widespread and deep-rooted racism blacks faced outside of Harlem contributed to making the black district a refuge for all blacks. Yet Harlem was no racial utopia. Blacks regularly endured unfair treatment and segregation in Harlem, especially in the chain stores along 125th Street that were less dependent upon local black patronage throughout the late 1920s. Nonetheless, blacks’ heightened expectations of the North, coupled with their experiences as privileged consumers in much of Harlem, challenged whites’ denial of their dignity and political rights across the city. Harlem’s social reform campaign originated from black leaders’ and reformers’ efforts to simultaneously accommodate the expansion of the black population and shape the behavior of blacks in the district’s public amusements. In this way, Harlem community rights reflected not only blacks’ demands for safe housing, economic autonomy, and civil rights, but also social reform, which often took the form of neighborhood respectability and discipline. Civic-minded blacks waged an uphill battle against black consumption of films, alcohol, and other forms of pleasure-seeking activities in Harlem. Black reformers and journalists were also concerned about Harlemites’ wellbeing. Even before the Great Migration, the expansion of the city’s black population had exhausted the black community’s already limited resources. Black institutional churches and social reformers, such as clubwoman Victoria Earle Matthew, mustered their neighborhood resources to attend to the pre–World

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War migration. Black reformers tirelessly delivered services to and provided training programs for blacks, but their uplift strategies could go only so far. By 1911, an interracial organization, the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, later renamed the National Urban League, formed to prepare blacks for urban life in the North. Social reform, in this sense, meant preparing migrants for modernity and to be citizens. Migration to the North, therefore, was only the first step to citizenship. Citizenship had to be embodied. By employing a citizenship discourse, which conceptualized blacks’ self-help and uplift efforts in the neighborhood as the embodiment of citizenship, black and white reformers tried to demonstrate blacks’ civic fitness. The league also played an integral role in transforming Harlem into a mobilized community. Through its cooperative efforts, the league created a network of neighborhood and city agencies responsive to the needs of the black community. The league hoped to persuade private and public social agencies—that is, white-controlled welfare agencies—to invest in the black community, to employ trained black social workers in their agencies to effect change from the inside, and particularly to open their doors to black clients. These individual and collectives efforts for better housing, community building, civil rights, and social reform challenged New York City’s claims to liberalism. At the same time, these intraracial and interracial struggles jumpstarted Harlem’s movement for community rights. As a haven from antiblack racism, and a cultural space of racial restoration, Harlem was not only the place where blacks lived but also the place where they felt most human, which, in turn, bolstered their claims upon Harlem and reinvigorated their struggles to realize their community rights.

“Real Estate Race War”: Taking Harlem “When Negro New Yorkers evaluate their benefactors in their own race,” opined James Weldon Johnson, “they must find that not many have done more than Phil Payton, for much of what has made Harlem the intellectual and artistic capital of the Negro world is in good part due to this fundamental advantage.” As Payton remembered, his initial entry into the real estate business occurred when “to ‘get even’ one of them [white homeowners] turned his house over to me to fill with colored tenants. I was successful in rending and managing this house, and after a time I was able to induce other landlords to . . . give me their house[s] to manage.” The dispute among white landlords foreshadowed increasing disunity among white Harlemites, as blacks rapidly secured housing in the district during the first decade of the twentieth

18 | The Making of the Negro Mecca

century. Only thirty years before, Harlem had been an inaccessible suburb inhabited by affluent whites. The only blacks living in Harlem then worked as domestics in the homes of wealthy whites. Structural changes in city’s residential districts and the real estate bust in Harlem precipitated the economic conditions wherein blacks could compete for and eventually claim real estate in Harlem. While Payton certainly jumpstarted the migration to Harlem, the real estate race war was won by the combined efforts of black tenants, black realtors, the New York Age, and black churches.9 During the 1870s, urban development in the city dislocated black enclaves living in the Tenderloin district. The construction of Pennsylvania Station forced blacks to leave the Tenderloin, destroying entire residential blocks. Between 1878 and 1881, three lines of elevated railroads were built as far north as 129th Street. As speculators purchased and resold property, builders bought land and constructed houses.10 Harlem’s real estate market was booming by the 1890s. Yet areas distant from transportation and along the waterfront— marshes, garbage dumps, and lots—remained noticeably undeveloped. In the years from 1898 to 1904, speculators and developers purchased and developed these areas, initiating a new wave of building. In West Harlem’s wide tree-lined streets, builders constructed luxurious apartment buildings north of Central Park. By 1905 the elegantly designed buildings, with spacious rooms and wide windows, were mostly vacant. Over-speculation had inflated land and housing prices in proportion to the real value of the property. In the same year, financial institutions stopped issuing loans to both speculators and building companies and foreclosed mortgaged properties. Misjudging the timing for the completion of the subway, builders had hastily constructed buildings four and five years in advance. Speculators had built too many apartments and charged prices, ranging from thirty-five to forty-five dollars per month, that few New Yorkers could afford. As a result, landlords who were desperate to draw in tenants reduced rents, as well as offered a few months rent free to would-be tenants.11 *

*

*

Born on February 27, 1876, in Westfield, Massachusetts, Philip A. Payton, Jr., was the second of four children whose father was a barber, and mother was a hairdresser. He arrived in New York in 1899, and, after working at various jobs in 1900, he established a real estate office at 67 West 134th Street. At the same time, a string of white mob attacks on black districts, high rents, and housing congestion were forcing black New Yorkers to search for safer neighborhoods and affordable dwellings. In the late nineteenth century, the majority of blacks lived either in the Tenderloin district, from Twenty-Third to Forty-Second

The Making of the Negro Mecca

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Streets between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, or in the San Juan Hill area, from Fifty-Ninth Street to the upper Sixties, between Amsterdam and West End Avenues. Harlem’s real estate bust presented opportunities for astute black realtors like Payton to benefit from the situation. Alert to Harlem’s collapsed real estate market, Payton exploited the white realtors’ disagreement to secure better housing for blacks. By filling up the apartments, Payton saved white business owners’ investments while providing blacks with the best housing they had ever lived in. Blacks quickly seized the opportunities to live in the new buildings. First, they settled into buildings east of Lenox Avenue. But once they began moving west of Lenox Avenue, white tenants, business owners, and others mobilized to halt the so-called “Negro Invasion.”12 This early “real estate race war” was waged generally from one building to the next, as blacks moved into white tenanted blocks. While blacks and whites openly battled for Harlem real estate, intraracial conflict among white landlords engendered the circumstances for the so-called race war. As the ire of white tenants’ and neighboring white building owners’ became more inflamed, they began organizing to rid their neighborhood of black tenants. New Yorkers, black and white, debated the fairness of black tenants benefitting from quarrels among white landlords. In the New York Times editorial section, one letter writer queried, “would A [landlord] be justified, morally or otherwise, in filling his house with negro tenants by way of getting back at B for not taking better care of his property?” This so-called “question of ethics,” highlights white New Yorkers’ overall aversion to living among black tenants, as well as disunity among whites. Nonetheless, white Harlemites rallied around the idea that Harlem belonged to white people, charging that blacks had displaced them. White Harlem residents and local businesses fiercely engaged in “border warfare,” whereby they tried to prohibit black settlement beyond certain blocks. “White people,” as Winthrop D. Lane remembered in 1925, “did not want to see their neighborhoods turn black. First one street was set as the ‘dead line’ (in white parlance) of the Negro advance, and then another.”13 In May 1904, Reverend N. S. Betts presided at an “indignation meeting” of black tenants at the Mercy Seat Baptist Church, at 46 West 135thStreet, between Lenox and Madison Avenues. The white landlord had raised their rents and served them eviction notices, alleging that the tenants were “noisy and disorderly.” At the meeting, the tenants denounced the accusation; according to Dr. Betts, “the very landlords who had once invited negro tenants are now trying to drive them out.” Old residents explained that white tenants first occupied the apartments, but “a quarrel between two house owners led to the admission of negro tenants.” White landlords, therefore, used black tenants

20

| The Making of the Negro Mecca

to settle skirmishes amongst themselves, undoubtedly to the chagrin of the powerless white tenants. But construction of the subway station changed matters; Dr. Betts and the black tenants “declared a systematic campaign had been started by their [white] landlords to force them from the neighborhood.”14 Blacks also mobilized to stake a claim to Harlem’s real estate. In 1904, Payton founded the Afro-American Realty Company, and by 1905, he had purchased and leased six apartment buildings. The prospectus for the stock explained that “the reason for the present conditions of the colored tenancy in New York City today is because of the race prejudice of the white owner and white agent.”15 The realty company aimed to counterbalance the racism of white realtors and owners by providing affordable housing to black tenants. Payton unceremoniously replaced white tenants with black tenants. As the Times reported, just before the Christmas holiday, “white folks, hat in hand, fled into the real estate office of a negro named Philip A. Payton, Jr., . . . and pleaded that they might be left in undisturbed possession of their little flats over the holidays.”16 Thus from an initial squabble between white landlords, black realtors and moneyed blacks joined forces to provide housing for “respectable, law-abiding negroes” with means.17 As the decade wore on, some whites fled Harlem, while others struggled to hold on to their properties. The initial trickle of blacks swiftly grew into a “colony.” By 1910, white residents established realty companies, but this time they used restrictive covenants to prohibit black tenancy in the neighborhood. In the winter of 1910, whites tore off a “To Let” sign nailed to a tenement inviting black tenants. This and similar signs foreshadowed not only an increased presence of blacks but also the replacement of white tenants. Thereafter, white Harlem immediately channeled their aggression into legal action.18 In February 1911, the New York Times reported that ninety-one homeowners on 136th Street, between Lenox and Eighth Avenues, representing 85 percent of owners on those blocks, established a covenant, banning black tenants for fifteen years. The property owners, explained the Times, “bind themselves ‘not to allow any part of their premises to be occupied in whole or in part by any negro, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon of either sex either as tenant, guest, boarder, or occupant in any manner.’” The property owners denied any intent of discrimination against blacks. As a matter of circumventing the potential unconstitutionality of the covenant, they claimed that they desired only the “continuance of the rents obtained prior to the time that houses in the neighborhood began being rented to negro tenants.”19 As before, whites mobilized to ward off the so-called invasion of black tenants; their doing so signaled a rise of white vulnerability and insecurity. The covenant’s language endeavored to employ color-blind reasoning to rebut the claim that the white building

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owners had racist motivations. They aimed to prohibit black tenancy not because they were racist but because black “occupancy depreciates [property] values.”20 Black New Yorkers pressed on with their campaign to provide housing for blacks. Black realtors such as John E. Nail, Henry C. Parker, J. C. Thomas, Watt Terry, John N. Royal, J. B. Woods, and J. M. Green promptly followed in Payton’s footsteps by buying property and renting to black tenants. The partnership of Nail and Parker was especially successful. They effectively broke the covenants, thereby gaining the confidence of lending institutions, and within a short time, investing houses in the financial district employed them as consultants. Black churches especially played an instrumental role in the campaign for blacks to obtain better housing in Harlem. In 1909, Reverend Hutchins C. Bishop tried to purchase property on the south side of West 135th Street to rebuild St. Phillips Episcopal Church. When the building owners refused to sell to Bishop because of his race, Bishop hired Nail and Parker. Since he was light-skinned, Nail opportunistically passed as a white man, and he settled the deal. “White tenants in the neighborhood” claimed Ted Yates, Works Progress Administration writer, “protested long and loud, before the purchase.” But once it was announced that blacks owned the property, “the whites cleared out and Negroes moved.”21 In 1911, Parker and Nail, once again representing St. Phillips Episcopal Church, outbid a white company, Hudson Realty Company, and purchased ten apartments on the north side of 135th Street, between Lenox and Seventh Avenues.22 Only days before Parker and Nail negotiated this major deal, the New York Age highlighted that “in the office of the renting agents in the same houses stood the insulting board, ‘the agents promise their tenants that these houses will be rented only to WHITE people.” But once again, blacks were victorious. Relishing the black realtors’ victory, the New York Age flippantly suggested that black residents occupying the new houses “might let loose on instruments of music sometimes and show their [white] friends to the back of them what a blessed thing it is to be happy.”23 Uncertainty in the real estate market spurred disunity within the white community. John G. Taylor, president of the Property Owners Protective Association of Harlem, commanded white tenants and homeowners to unite based on their shared racial identity. In April 1911, according to Harlem Home News, white Harlem’s local paper, Taylor claimed that “three months from now the Negro invasion, so far as this part of Harlem is concerned, will be a thing of the past.” Taylor tried to prevent “white renegades” from borrowing any money to support black speculators. He told the reporter to “look deep into this Harlem situation . . . and you will find the unclean hand of the white

22 | The Making of the Negro Mecca

deserter.” He plainly stated, “the nigger in the Harlem property woodpile is a white man.”24 Throughout the remainder of the decade, Harlem’s white population gradually declined. White Harlem’s efforts failed to stem black expansion. In 1913, the Harlem Board of Commerce invited black realtors to a meeting to effect amiable relations among black and white realtors. E. H. Koch, an officer of the board, who disapproved of the “obnoxious . . . antagonism stirred up between the two races,” declared that blacks had the right to live anywhere in Harlem.25 White realty companies lacked the full support of the white community, particularly white investors and owners primarily interested in profit. While many owners hastily sold their property regardless of the price, the fragility of the real estate market eventually pressured whites committed to maintaining an all-white neighborhood to rent or sell to blacks in order to prevent foreclosure. 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.26

Ultimately, without white tenants willing to pay Harlem rents, white property owners could ill afford not to rent to black tenants. Some white property owners, to the dismay of their neighboring homeowners, claimed that blacks were better tenants. In other cases, landlords quickly learned that they could demand higher rents from black tenants. In 1912, Reginald H. Schenck admitted, “yes, I think I can get more from negro than from white tenants, and I have two or three propositions under consideration.”27 Schenck’s honesty both underlined the vulnerability of white unity and foreshadowed a quite different housing battle—the race and class struggle between black tenants and landlords during and after the World War I period. White realtors’ invitation to black realtors such as John Nail in 1913 may have been the beginning of the next phase of the housing struggle in Harlem, wherein realtors, regardless of race, exploited black renters. Nonetheless, market forces and intraracial conflict among whites in real estate created the conditions to change the history of black Manhattan before the Great War. The real estate race war in Harlem, therefore, was the first battle—waged victoriously by black tenants, realtors, black churches, and black newspapers—in this emerging black district, where black New Yorkers

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became Harlemites. By the early 1920s, the majority of Harlem’s residences were black, though the district remained residentially and commercially in the control of whites. During the pre–World War I era, Harlem rapidly transformed from a scattering of blacks residences in a white neighborhood to a thriving black neighborhood and eventually the cultural and intellectual epicenter of black America.

The Making of the Black Metropolis Once in Harlem, blacks began the work of creating their black mecca. The construction of religious, cultural, and neighborhood institutions was only part of the community-building process, however. To create a thriving black community, blacks aspired to establish race businesses. Harlem’s black leaders hoped that race businesses might bolster Harlem’s economic self-sufficiency, ensure racial autonomy, and cultivate racial loyalty. These efforts were undermined, as black proprietors struggled to compete with white proprietors. Still, the amalgam of black and white enterprises established Harlem as a black consumers’ paradise and powerfully contributed to the institutional make-up of Harlem as a black metropolis. As greater numbers of blacks settled in Harlem, they brought along their old neighborhood institutions and created new ones. Between 1890 and 1900, New York City’s black population increased from 36,183 to 60,666, of whom 36,246 lived in Manhattan.28 Relocation to Harlem did not happen at once. Although the majority of black New Yorkers lived in Harlem by World War I, a significant portion of the black population continued to live in the San Juan Hill area. Between 1910 and 1930, the city’s black population climbed from 91,709 to 327,706; by then, approximately 224,670 lived in Manhattan and 160,340 in Harlem, with the Caribbean population representing approximately 25 percent (39,833) of Harlem’s black population.29 The community also expanded geographically. In 1920, the majority of the black population lived between 131st Street and 144th Street, between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. By 1928, Harlem had expanded north, from 110th Street and Central Park East to 159th Street to the Polo Grounds, and east, from St. Nicholas Avenue to the Harlem River.30 Minsters, including Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, started “on to Harlem” movements.31 Before 1914, St. Phillip’s Protestant Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zionist Church, and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church had moved to Harlem. Other churches, such as Mount Olivet Baptist, St. Marks Methodist Episcopal, St. James Presbyterian, and Union Baptist, followed their congregants to Harlem.

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Some churches were already established in Harlem; these included Reverend F. A. Cullen’s Salem Memorial Methodist Church founded in 1902, and Charles Douglas Martin’s Moravian Church founded in 1908. Other churches sprang from shared denominational and familial affiliations; for example, the St. Cyprian Episcopal Church in San Juan Hill run by John H. Johnson, Sr., gave rise to the St. Martin Episcopal Church founded in 1928 in Harlem by his son, John H. Johnson, Jr.32 Black New York’s southern and Afro-Caribbean institutions also found their way to Harlem from San Juan Hill. In 1897, for example, Bermudians Clarence W. Robinson and George L. Joell founded the Bermuda Benefit Association in San Juan Hill. Caribbean migrants also formed benefit societies that promoted “the general interests of West Indians,” such as the American West Indian Ladies Society created in 1917. Similarly, southerners established their own associations, such as the Sons and Daughters of Virginia (1920) and the Sons and Daughters of Florida (1924), which held cultural and educational forums, as well as paying the members’ and their families’ expenses in times of poor health and death. Blacks also belonged to fraternal organizations, including the Odd Fellows, Masons, Pythians, and the Improvement Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World.33 Harlemites also created associations that addressed various neighborhood issues. In 1908, J. Frank Wheaton, J. C. Thomas, and Bert Williams, the renowned black comedian, founded the Equity Congress, a civil rights association, to take up local matters of importance to the black community. While sitting at a local Irish saloon, the three men discussed “the deplorable conditions in New York City affecting the Negro. Discrimination was rife against them and police brutality was very much in evidence.” Before long, the Equity Congress attracted distinguished members such as W. E. B. Du Bois, realtor John E. Royall, Bishop Ransom, and politician James Anderson among others. While the Equity Congress attended to various issues, it was best known for aiding in the appointment of Samuel J. Battle, the first black officer in Manhattan, to the New York Police Department in 1911. Several years later, the Equity Congress helped establish the 15th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard, the celebrated 369th Regiment of the United States Army popularly known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Other significant neighborhood organizations included the North Harlem Community Council and the West Harlem Community Council. During the housing crisis that occurred after the World War I, each of these neighborhood organizations informed Harlemites about the Emergency Rent Laws and their rights as tenants under those laws. In forging such networks, and especially sharing their resources towards common goals, Harlem’s cultural, fraternal, benevolent, and protest

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organizations contributed to making Harlem a mobilized community. Of all the institutions operating in Harlem, race businesses were the most important, according to most neighborhood leaders.34 The bevy of organizations founded to promote, improve, and expand race businesses exemplified Harlemites’ enthusiasm for entrepreneurialism. Harlemites founded the Colored Liquor Dealer’s Association in 1912, the New York Colored Business Men’s Association in 1915, the National Design Model and Dressmakers’ Association in 1920, and Association of Trade and Commerce in 1921.35 Harlem also had its own Horatio Alger character, Mary Dean, known locally as “Pig Foot Mary.” For many years, near the subway entrance at 135th street and Lenox Avenue, Dean marketed her “delicacies,” such as pigs’ feet and pigs’ ears, winning her a respected reputation throughout the black district. Over the years, she made a small fortune and retired to manage her real estate investments.36 Such success stories played an important role in attracting migrants to New York City. While the narrative of businessmen like Philip Payton may have inspired blacks to invest in real estate, stories like Pig Foot Mary’s crystallized for many migrants how their hard work might pay off. The best-known and revered businessman in Harlem was Fred R. Moore, the owner and editor of the New York Age. Moore was born in Virginia in 1857 but raised in Washington, D.C. Impressed by Moore’s Afro-American Investment & Building Company, Booker T. Washington appointed him to be an organizer for the National Negro Business League. With the aid of Washington, Moore purchased the New York Age in 1907, and used it to support the movement to Harlem. Following the philosophy of his mentor, Moore also utilized the Age to champion black business. In December 1912, for example, the Age publicized the achievements of black businesses in Harlem. According to the black weekly, their accomplishments demonstrated the excellence and the integrity of the race: “There are plenty of people right here in New York who think they [black businessmen] amount to nothing. They think that way because they don’t know any better. Our merchants, doctors, lawyers, undertakers, druggists, hotel and restaurant keepers, garage owners, theatre lessees and real estate men are all here, however, and growing stronger all of the time.”37 In 1914, James Weldon Johnson implored Harlemites to build race businesses and to tailor their enterprises to the needs of the growing black consumer base. According to Johnson, “around the Kimberly region [in South Africa] it is likely that many a native stubbed his toe against a diamond and kicked it out of the way.” Johnson admonished Harlemites that they had an opportunity and that they had better not sleep “over a gold mine.” He urged prospective business owners to view the operation of a business as a sci-

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ence, which required careful study of the competition and the consumers; he also encouraged business owners to focus on the elements that they had control over. Johnson also had ulterior motives. Hoping to promote black business, he tried to assuage intraracial friction between black consumers and black-owned businesses, which arose from the noticeable success of white businesses in Harlem. “Every nationality is making money out of Negroes in Harlem—except Negroes,” lamented many black entrepreneurs. Johnson sagely reminded black businesses that they were dependent upon black patrons. He warned black entrepreneurs not to blame blacks for patronizing white businesses, for “the race will and does patronize Negroes business enterprises conducted on a business basis.” While he emphasized the importance of race pride, Johnson explained, “mere race pride is no sound basis on which to do business.” The consummate pragmatist, Johnson reinforced black patrons’ race pride and loyalty by focusing on blacks’ establishments utilizing better business practices.38 Johnson unsuccessfully tried to camouflage mounting tensions between black patrons and black proprietors. In spite of the efforts and appeals of Moore, Johnson, and black business associations to foster racial pride and race entrepreneurialism, whites hobbled the expansion of black businesses. While the race won the battle for residences—really, tenancy—it lost the battle for ownership of commercial property. Whites either refused to sell to blacks for commercial purposes or charged them exorbitant prices for store property. Describing the case of store rentals in Harlem in 1911, the New York Age declared, “there was a disposition [among whites and Jews] not to rent store property to Negroes, even when they are most numerous of the population of a given block.”39 In the spring of 1916, the New York Age investigated black and white businesses in Harlem to determine the proportion of black patronage each received. The Age canvassed Fifth, Lenox, and Seventh Avenues, from 131st to 138th streets, and 135th street from Fifth to Seventh Avenues, and found that there were 503 businesses, with 378 run by whites and 125 by blacks. White proprietors employed 150 blacks, mainly in menial positions, and black proprietors, the Age reminded readers, employed 431 blacks “in positions of responsibility, requiring ability, brains, and training.”40 The Age also noted that very few of the white business owners lived in the neighborhood, while the majority of black proprietors lived in the neighborhood. In each of the four districts of Harlem, blacks were the majority of the population. Yet despite this, whites often refused to lease their property to blacks, especially in some areas. For example, the Age reported “it is a matter of common report that it is useless effort for a colored man to make an attempt to secure business quarters on the west side of Seventh Avenue.” On

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Lenox Avenue, groups of white ethnics created syndicates that they used to lease solely to members of their ethnic group.41 By underscoring racial cooperation among white ethnics and the discrimination black businesses faced at the hands of whites, the Age tried to stimulate racial loyalty, and especially to persuade blacks to patronize black businesses. Black business owners were responsible community members, the Age intimated, because they employed blacks in respectable positions. While the Age appealed to race loyalty, it also began to develop an economic and consumer politics around Harlemites’ community rights. Harlemites’ economic rights were anchored in their status as the majority of the district’s residents and patrons, which legitimized their expectation that local businesses cater to their economic demands. The Age’s appeal to black loyalty and to black proprietors’ commitment to Harlemites’ community rights was reinforced by indicating that black proprietors employed more blacks than white-controlled businesses and that they placed them in respectable positions. The Age also called attention to the residency of white proprietors not only to frame them as outsiders but also to point out that they took advantage of black patrons and were not invested in the black community. In all of the four districts investigated in 1916, white businesses received more than 70 percent of black patronage, lamented the Age. Many black businesses owners blamed black consumers. Mr. Nicholas, the leader of the Colored Business Men’s Association, asserted “that our people have never been accustomed to trading with Negro merchants.” Black consumers, however, claimed that black merchants took their patronage for granted. Others stated that black proprietors did not have the goods they desired and, in some cases, were “unreliable in fulfilling [their] promises.” Through business organizations, black business leaders tried to cultivate better relations with black consumers. For example, the prime concern of the New York Colored Business Men’s Association was to establish strategies to attract “the patronage of the race . . . to race merchant[s] to a larger degree than obtained at that time.”42 Similarly, the Colored Business Men’s Association aspired to “influence the people of the race to spend more largely of their earnings with the Negro merchant” and “to influence the Negro merchant to be prepared in every particular to handle the trade he is seeking to acquire.”43 These directives and strategies exposed the intraracial cleavages between black patrons and proprietors and the resilience of racism in Harlem. Throughout the 1920s, very little changed. In 1920, for example, the Chicago Defender described the ease with which non-blacks obtained property in Harlem: “On Lenox Avenue the store on the northeast corner of 138th Street has been rented by a Jew, who intends to open a pawnshop. On the northwest corner another Jew is opening a hat store. We learn that when the business men

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of our Race applied for some of these places they found the rent had been jumped in some instances $1,000 per year.”44 White proprietors continued to block the expansion of black business, even as the black population grew through the remainder of the decade. By 1928, the New York Amsterdam News admitted, “THESE ARE PAINFUL FACTS, but they must be faced squarely if the Negro’s economic condition in Harlem is to improve.” The Amsterdam News zeroed in on the persistence and pervasiveness of white racism, asserting that “the blame does not rest solely upon the Negro business man. He is confronted . . . by the competition and pressure of white retailers, wholesalers, bankers, and syndicates who conspire to drive him to the wall.” Thus rather than being “a city within a city,” as James Weldon Johnson contended, Harlem was a mere colony of New York City.45

“Only Negroes Belong in Harlem” But from the perspective of black Harlemites, old and new, the black district was a Negro mecca. By the time white America discovered Harlem in the mid-1920s, black New Yorkers had been basking in the culture and nightlife of the black metropolis for more than a decade. The rapid expansion of both the city’s black population and the borders of the black community during the Great War was mirrored in the scale of Harlem’s entertainment district. Outside of Harlem, black New Yorkers incessantly faced the ire of white citizens. While Harlem was no utopia, it proffered them greater freedom and privilege as patrons than they received elsewhere around the city. White proprietors, especially those located in central Harlem, generally catered to blacks even as their counterparts outside of Harlem refused to. That this prevailed in their own residential neighborhood bolstered blacks’ feeling of freedom, and reinforced the idea that Harlem belonged to black people. Harlem’s entertainment center grew out of black cultural institutions in the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill districts. At the turn of the twentieth century, West Fifty-Third Street was the cultural hub of black Manhattan. Black and white musicians, writers, actors, and composers congregated at the Marshall and the Maceo hotels. Before long, news of the grandeur and spectacle of black bohemia’s culture had traveled across the nation. Midwestern musician Taylor Gordon, for one, wondered what “every one at home” would say to him about his going to “New York—the biggest city in the U.S.A.! A feeling that comes once in a lifetime.”46 Gordon stopped first in black Manhattan’s famed Marshall Hotel, where he remembered feeling “that of all the places I had been, New York was the best.”47

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Before blacks settled in Harlem, black southerners and would-be Harlemites had raptly absorbed the enchanting stories about the revelries and cosmopolitanism of the city. As migrants returned south, they told tantalizing tales of adventure in the big city, rousing the interests’ of family and friends. A black man from St. Helena Island, South Carolina, who left at the age of seventeen in 1909, recalled, “I go home every two years . . . When I go home, my mother’s house can’t hold all the people.” He was convinced that, “Everyone, I don’t care who he is nor where he is, wants to see New York some day. . . . I have sat up all night talking to people down there about the things I’ve seen up here.”48 Curiosity enticed many blacks to Harlem, and the magnetism of the metropolis kept them there, despite their collisions with northern racism. As one Helena Islander explained his motivation for leaving the South, “main thing was my big notion to see New York.”49 Another Helena Islander remarked, “I don’t know what it was that held me in New York after I got there. I didn’t have a job for some little but it was just the lure of the city—just the difference between life here and on the island that made me like it.” In his 1912 masters’ thesis, Paul Seymour noted that a migrant from Virginia felt “freer and more irresponsible . . . [and] accepts willingly the condition of ‘every man for himself ’ and like[d] to feel himself a part of the ‘great metropolitan whirl’.”50 The migrant’s experience spoke to the scale and variety of public amusements to which he now had access and especially to his newfound freedom from the constraints of the Jim Crow South.51 Well before the second decade of the century, Harlem had become the epicenter of black New York’s leisure and cultural life. Harlem offered a variety of public amusements, including saloons, cabarets, and theaters. Recollecting his arrival in New York City in 1914, Claude McKay noted that “the only Negro businesses, excepting barber shops, “were the churches and the cabarets.”52 Blacks “snatch[ed] from saloon and cabaret and home a few brief moments of pleasure, of friendship and of love.” While black-owned resorts amounted to only a fraction of the commercial entertainment available in Harlem, many blacks proudly patronized establishments owned, controlled, and managed by members of the race.53 “The Negro cabaretier made a special instrument of the cabaret to attract and hold the restive customers of his race,” McKay recalled. Leroy Wilkins’s Leroy’s Café (1910–1923), J. W. Connor’s Royale Café (1913–1930), and Barron Wilkins’s Astoria Café (1914–1924) were Harlem’s major night spots before World War I. As places of congregation, Harlem resorts offered blacks places for pleasure and cultural sociability; they were sites where patrons and performers could mutually reinforce their humanity.54 According to McKay, blacks found

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“an intimate theatre of relaxation . . . where bachelors were beguiled by darkly singing damsels, . . . chinking glasses, the erotic suggestive of Negro music and wailing ‘blues’ of the entertainer.” Blues singer Ethel Waters exemplifies black performers’ influence on black patrons. At the end of World War I, Waters began singing at Edmond’s Cellar at 132nd and Fifth Avenue. According to Waters, “Edmond’s drew the sporting men, the hookers, and other assorted underworld characters.” Her blues music brought crowds to Edmond’s. She believed they identified with her songs because her “characterizations . . . drew from real life.” When Edmond demanded that she sing something other than blues, which he described as “that yangedy, yangedy, yangedy,” the people fled and reproached Edmond, lamenting, “we don’t want to hear nothin’ else but her blues.” Of course, he relented. Through her music, Waters offered a sonic session of therapy for black patrons, especially those whom black society labeled disreputable.55 Leisure places like Edmond’s were also havens for black performers. Among black audiences, black performers found patrons who took their music expression and artistry seriously. When Earl Dancer, part owner of the Golden Gate Inn, encouraged Waters to sing in white theaters for a white audience, she remarked, “no white audience would understand my blues.” She believed that “Negroes who were getting by on the white time [white patronized establishments] were like caricatures of human beings.” Waters contended, “I ain’t changing my style for nothing or nobody.”56 Yet beyond the relationship between black patrons and black performers, black proprietors continued to compete with white-owned businesses. Interracial and intraracial tensions in the leisure marketplace often spurred cultural innovation, as black cabaretiers competed with whites for black patrons. John W. Connor, a disenchanted black club owner who ran the Royale Café on West 135th Street, contended that blacks refused to patronize black-owned businesses. Chagrined, Connor complained, “today I can show you saloon after saloon in Harlem where colored men congregate in large numbers all day, and only a few years ago the Negro’s money was not wanted under any circumstances.” Thus in order to survive and thrive in Harlem, white proprietors, without necessarily changing their views about black people, began catering to the local consumer market of black patrons. Black consumer power lay in the numerical majority of blacks, who formed the prime consumer base in Harlem. As such, they enjoyed the grand scale and variety of amusements available to them in their own neighborhood, giving them a sense of ownership that was viscerally felt through the act of consumption. But to fully enjoy their freedom, blacks chose to consume beyond the color line, inciting the ire of black proprietors. These intraracial tensions, nonetheless, inspired black saloonkeepers to reorient their establishments for live performances,

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especially singing and dancing. In 1914, Connor first served tea and cocoa accompanied by live ragtime music. Leroy Wilkins, the owner of Leroy’s Café, offered tango tea, space for dancing, and even hired dancers to teach guests the newest dances at his Astoria Café. Goldie Cisco, who danced in the chorus line of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s all black musical Shuffle along on the Great White Way, taught guests the tango at Wilkins’s café. At other cafés, Harlemites heard ditties like Mamie Sharp’s “I’m Crazy About My Tango Man,” “That’s Why I’m Loving Someone Else Today,” “When You Play in the Game of Love,” and many others.57 In their neighborhood theaters, Harlemites also delighted in the productions of black performers that would later headline on Broadway. Beginning in the 1910, as James Weldon Johnson explains, “there grew up in Harlem a real Negro theatre, something New York had never seen before.” Thus, for the first time, black performers in the city had the opportunity to play for all-black audiences. In white theaters, blacks’ performances catered to the tastes and biases of white audiences, especially regarding sexual content. Internalizing taboos that black sexuality was inherently animalistic, whites did not believe that blacks could be romantic. Unrestrained, black performers offered black audiences a wider variety of storylines. In the Crescent, Lincoln, and Lafayette theaters, black dramas and comedies thrilled Harlem audiences. As Johnson opined, “a Negro audience seems never to laugh heartier than when laughing at itself—provided it is a strictly Negro audience.” In the early 1910s, black theatergoers watched the Darktown Follies, In Dahomey, Abyssinia, and other shows. In the Darktown Follies, the main character, Jim Jackson, sells his father-in-law’s plantation and flees to Washington, D.C. The actor J. Leubrie Hill played Jackson and crossed-dressed as his wife. According to performance scholar Jayna Brown, the Darktown Follies was not only “a satire on the sharp class divisions among African Americans living in the nation’s capital” but also “variety artists’ response to the harsh criticism and public dismissal of popular forms of music and dance.” In these semi-autonomous black theaters, black performers and audiences expressed a fuller range of their humanity, for they “found [themselves] in an entirely different psychological atmosphere.” Perhaps more significantly, black performers and patrons had the freedom to poke fun at racial stereotypes and intraracial class divisions, knowing that these depictions of black life would not be used against them.58 Much more than a mere neighborhood of religious, commercial, and cultural buildings, Harlem was a refuge, where blacks enjoyed a level of anonymity, and with that a degree of power that they rarely experienced elsewhere. As Wallace Thurman explained, “once in Harlem one seldom cares, for the sight of Harlem gives any Negro a feeling of great security.”59 This confidence and

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indifference to racial matters were even acknowledged by whites; as a reporter for the Saturday Review observed, “the black man who may not dare to order a ‘three-layer sandwich’ on Broadway can swagger into a café here among his own people and lord it like a white man.” The editorial spotlighted how some whites understood race and urban space in New York City. By juxtaposing the black man’s submissive conduct on Broadway and his swaggering gait in Harlem, the reporter revealed white northerners’ expectation of black male docility in white-identified areas, such that a black man’s noticeable enjoyment of a sandwich could only be interpreted as the deportment of a white man.60 These expectations of black servility by whites were more than discursive articulations. Many whites, often through the aid of police, tried to control black behavior in public spaces. Indeed, African Americans’ and African Caribbeans’ daily confrontations with these varied forms of white discursive and physical repression reinforced blacks’ identification of Harlem as a safe haven. By the 1920s, blacks held an almost proprietary claim upon the Negro Mecca. As Eslanda Robeson, Paul Robeson’s wife, proclaimed in 1930, “Only Negroes belong in Harlem.” According to cultural historian Jervis Anderson, blacks spoke the name “Harlem” “as though they had coined it themselves— not only to designate their area of residence but to express their sense of the various qualities of its life and atmosphere.”61 Strolling, one of Harlemites’ favorite pastimes, exemplifies blacks’ territorial claims on Harlem and showcases the individuality they most freely expressed among their own. Strolling was more than walking; it was both a communal and social affair, remembered James Weldon Johnson.62 By dint of their clothing, comportment, and gait, blacks appropriated Harlem streets as a stage, where they welcomed the gaze of onlookers, friends and strangers. As Arthur P. Davis explained, “this enjoyment was not the phony exotic primitivism which the white folks came uptown nightly to find in cabarets and other hot spots.”63 Instead, strolling afforded blacks a form of self-expression and the exhibition of their sartorial flair. With the aid of the “hotman,” the neighborhood purveyor of black market goods, rich or poor blacks purchased affordable and up-to-theminute fashions.64 Dressed to impress, blacks proudly promenaded along the district’s thoroughfares “pass[ing] the time pleasantly with . . . friends and acquaintances and, more important of all, the strangers” they were sure to meet.65 And if so lucky, they might see a celebrity. According to Davis, “if we strolled down the Avenue to the Lafayette Theater at 132nd Street, we often found under the famous Hope Tree such artists as Ethel Waters, Sissle and Blake, Fletcher Henderson, and Miller and Lyles.”66 Through this innocuous activity, blacks expressed their individuality and, more importantly, enjoyed the full range of their humanity. By strolling their metropolis, blacks sur-

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veyed the neighborhood, literally laying claim to all within their reach. All of Harlem—its theaters, cabarets, churches, libraries, and especially the streets— belonged to blacks.

“Why Cannot We Have Jim Crow Cars for These People, Now That They Are Turning Harlem Over to Them?” While Harlem offered blacks a vibrant cultural and institutional life, and more importantly a metropolis to call their own, white proprietors and citizens stubbornly barred and segregated blacks in public places around the city and to a lesser degree in Harlem. In July 1912, one white Harlemite lamented, “If one’s business takes him along Seventh Avenue it is annoying, to say the least, to have to walk out in the driveway because the sidewalk is taken up by these blacks, who haven’t either the good grace or the manners to move an inch.” Preferring white southerners’ strategies of containment, the writer asked, “why cannot we have Jim Crow cars for these people, now that they are turning Harlem over to them?”67 Public spaces in the city, especially in Harlem, constituted a contested terrain, operating as theaters of interracial conflict and spurring the politicization of black New Yorkers. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded and headquartered in New York City in 1909, scrambled to pressure white proprietors to respect and city officials to protect blacks’ civil rights. While black New Yorkers and newcomers enjoyed greater freedom than in the South, they still encountered overt racism, de facto segregation, and racial violence in public places. As W. E. B. Du Bois explained in the October 1911 issue of the Crisis, “The great problem [about New York City] is not so much lynching and disfranchisement as the daily, unceasing insults which lead ignorant whites, and also a good many who should know better, to look on the black man as less than human.”68 In Harlem and throughout the city, blacks rebelliously crossed the color line, demanding equal access to and equal treatment in all places of public accommodations. These everyday acts of opposition were expressions of the politics of dignity. While uninhibited access to public places was unquestionably a civil rights issue, blacks intrinsically understood segregation as a sign of disrespect and a denial of their dignity. Blacks’ demands for the enforcement of civil rights, therefore, were an extension of their struggle for community rights. They wanted to extend the treatment they received in their own community beyond Harlem to white-occupied spaces. The enforcement of civil rights, in other words, was the means to this end. Yet white New Yorkers, inflamed about losing Harlem to the black population, stubbornly de-

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nied blacks full access to public places. Furthermore, the relative freedoms blacks enjoyed in Harlem and the city in general—particularly their flagrant occupation of the subways, theaters, and restaurants among other spaces— incensed whites and incited them to verbally and physically abuse blacks in public places. Black Harlemites’ dogged commitment to make freedom real in the big city effectively matched whites’, city officials’, and proprietors’ efforts to abridge their civil rights and to maltreat them in public spaces. Blacks rejected whites’ attempts to control urban space and “white definitions of black rights, opportunities, and sociability.”69 In 1911, New York members of the NAACP including Joel E. Spingarn, Gilchrist Stewart, Mary W. Ovington, Charles H. Studin, and Arthur Spingarn set up a local branch, the New York Vigilance Committee, in Harlem.70 The local promptly challenged discrimination in public places and across the city. On January 23, 1912, the Vigilance Committee won a civil rights case against Harry K. Levy, the manager of the Lyric Theater. Levy had barred Louis F. Baldwin, a black man, from sitting in the two orchestra seats for which he had purchased tickets. Baldwin, accompanied by a black woman, arrived at the theater and showed the usher his seat stubs. The usher sent the couple to the balcony, where they found Levy, who admitted, “it was not the custom of the house to allow colored persons to sit in the orchestra.” After hearing Baldwin’s story, Joel Spingarn, president of the Harlem branch, decided to “test the truth of it” by building a case against the theater. On January 23, Spingarn detailed his experiences at the theater in court, recounting how several weeks after speaking with Baldwin, Spingarn had purchased two orchestra seats at the same theater, mentioning to the cashier in the box office “that he desired to bring a colored man with him.” According to Spingarn, the cashier lamented, “I am sorry, but I cannot give you orchestra seats then. We do not permit Negroes to sit in the orchestra.” Through Spingarn’s efforts, the Vigilance Committee successfully won the case and the court fined Levy fifty dollars.71 While the committee had early success, according to historian Charles Kellogg, “the branch . . . suffered from the fact that many of the officers were members of the national Board.”72 For the remainder of the 1910s and throughout the 1920s, internal squabbles over the responsibilities of the local branch, such as whether it should raise funds for the local branch or the national office or how legal work should be handled, contributed to instability.73 Historian Robert Schneider avers that colorism and elitism among the New York branch’s officials may have precluded them from appealing to the masses. As Schneider notes, “the face of the NAACP looked more café au lait and its accent sounded more refined New York than in other places.”74 Recalling the World War I era, J. Raymond Jones, a Virgin Islander and Har-

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lem politician, stated that “in those days organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League operated as middle-class organizations. Unlike the Garvey movement, they had little direct emotional appeal.” The NAACP continuously fought stubborn manifestations of racism, especially residential segregation and segregated education in the North and Midwest. The national office’s interests’ and civil rights concerns outside of the city consistently trumped local matters.75 In the upheaval of World War I and after, black southern and AfroCaribbean newcomers arrived in a neighborhood undergoing dynamic institutional and cultural development and a city trying to contain its everexpanding black population. The migration translated into an escalation of both de facto segregation and interracial strife in public places. Across the city, in addition to various forms of segregation, blacks also encountered racist images of black people in the city’s consumer marketplace.76 For example, in 1921, James Weldon Johnson requested the F. W. Woolworth Company to remove a sign that referred to licorice as “Nigger Babies,” shrewdly warning that “such a sign . . . would seriously affect their [blacks] inclination to purchase wares at your stores.” Within three days, Mr. Griffin of Woolworth’s responded, explaining that it would change the current name to the item’s original trade name—“Piccaninnies.” In reply, Johnson thanked Griffin for his courteous letter, and “with pleasure” acknowledged the change of the sign. These indignities were matched in public places as black consumers tried to enjoy all that Gotham city had to offer.77 The local branch tested many cases of discrimination in public accommodations, especially in restaurants and theaters. In some cases, NAACP officials and complainants either individually or jointly initiated letter-writing campaigns. In other cases, complainants demanded equal treatment and service on the spot. In the summer of 1919, for example, a waiter refused to serve Miss Olyve Jeter, a black woman, at a restaurant on East 42nd Street, near Grand Central Station. After Jeter wrote a letter to the restaurant owner, Childs Company, the company assured her that the matter would be addressed. Thus, when she and a companion entered a restaurant at 272 West 125th Street in Harlem, owned by the same company, and the manager told a waitress to inform Jeter that if she wanted to be served, she would have to “sit in a back seat,” Jeter held her ground, demanding to “see the manager, whereupon they were permitted to remain where they were.”78 In spite of the existence of civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in New York State, black patrons had to demand immediate and fair service in Harlem and throughout the city. With defiant resoluteness and patience, some blacks ate where they desired.

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These individual struggles were ultimately limited. Circumstance, particularly the disposition of the manager and the staff, determined how white proprietors and workers treated black patrons in restaurants and other consumer places. In September of 1919, Jessie Fauset, novelist and literary editor of the Crisis, the organ of the NAACP, patiently waited over a half an hour before the waiter served her in the lunchroom of Gimbel Brothers’ department store. Dissatisfied with the service, and offended by being “served by the ‘bus-boys’ rather than by the usual attendants,” Fauset wrote a letter to the store’s general manager requesting that he explain their policy “with reference to serving colored patrons” in the lunchroom.”79 Fauset hoped to coax Gimbels to serve black patrons in the future, informing the general manager that “she like[d] a statement from you letting myself and other colored people in New York know.” Fauset’s requests and tone, like Johnson’s, reflected Harlemites’ growing consciousness and rising expectations of their power as consumers. During the war and throughout the 1920s, black leaders had contended that businesses expecting black patronage needed to treat its black patrons fairly. But the Gimbel Brothers’ management did not reply. As Fauset wrote to John R. Shillady, an official of the NAACP, “I have been waiting vainly for an answer . . . from Gimbels and [the] general manager.”80 Gimbels’ non-response reflected some white businesses’ indifference to the concerns of black consumers. Without white proprietors’ compliance with the state’s civil rights laws, many establishments were closed to black patrons. Black New Yorkers could never take for granted that they would be treated fairly in public places, for every occasion opened them up to the possibility for insult. In restaurants and other public places, nonetheless, blacks won minor victories, aggressively demanding and sporadically receiving fair treatment. Blacks’ beloved Harlem oftentimes was no different than the rest of the city. On November 30, 1921, James Weldon Johnson wrote a letter to Mr. Marcus Loew, of Loews Theaters. Johnson explained that the Victoria Theater on 125th Street in Harlem excluded black patrons from the orchestra seats, even when the cashier sold them tickets for that area. Reminding the theater owner of the New York State’s Civil Rights Law amended April 13, 1918, Johnson admonished Loew to “correc[t] this flagrant violation of the law before we take legal steps to correct this condition.”81 In a short letter, Loew’s Incorporated replied, “We are thoroughly aware of the existence of the Civil Rights Law. Employees of theatres, in which we are interested, are instructed by their respective managements to afford equal accommodations to all persons, irrespective of race, creed, or color.” But without enforcement of the law, Johnson’s threat meant little, and Loew’s reply even less. The city’s malfeasance and Loews’s noncompliance mutually reinforced the perpetuation of de facto

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segregation. Throughout the remainder of the twenties, Loews irreverently and unrelenting sequestered black patrons to the balcony, notoriously dubbed “Nigger Heaven.” A Loews’ usher in 1927 even casted out and insulted Marion D. Day, the youngest daughter of Fred R. Moore of the New York Age, along with her husband and son. In 1929, Jacob Brigman of the NAACP, wrote to Mayor James J. Walker, inquiring if the manager at the same Victoria Theater had the right to prohibit blacks from sitting in the orchestra or if the theater was “taking the law in their own hands?” Brigman suggested sardonically that “it would be more honest to Colored people to place a sign in the box office with . . . (merely as a suggestion) [the] words ‘NO COLORED PEOPLE ALLOWED IN THE ORCHESTRA OF THIS THEATRE’[;] with such a sign the Colored people would feel less embarrassed.” Like Fauset before him, Brigman highlighted blacks’ indignation in the face of de facto segregation. The hypocrisy and complicity of the city government legitimized the racist practices of white proprietors and reinforced segregation as an insidious feature of Harlem and New York City.82 The activism of the local branch of the NAACP often revealed its prejudice against certain blacks’ behavior in public places. In Shillady’s and Johnson’s appeals to Gimbel Brothers and Loews Theaters, the NAACP argued for the equal treatment of the complainants on the basis of their respectability. According to Johnson, “In certain of these theatres, notably the Victoria Theatre on 125th Street, when colored people,—it matters not how respectable they may be—attempt to purchase orchestra seats they are told that none are vacant but they will be seated in the balcony.”83 While the NAACP assiduously fought for the rights of all blacks, Johnson’s comments reveal that he believed the content of blacks’ character might determine how they should be treated. As the Tattler opined while reporting the increase in segregation in theaters in Harlem in 1924, “Some of the trouble is caused by the rude conduct of some of our group, who do not appear to know how to behave themselves in public places.”84 Civil rights leaders’ and journalists’ calls to maintain respectability and racial dignity in the face of blatant discrimination partly and unduly placed the burden of desegregation on black New Yorkers rather than on the unlawful proprietors and malfeasant city officials who failed to enforce the state’s civil rights laws. Blacks’ behavior in public places often reflected their unwillingness to accept whites’ insults to their dignity. In 1920, at the elevator station at the corner of 130th Street and Eighth Avenue, an attendant who was collecting tickets from passengers assaulted Maude P. LaVann, a black woman. According to M. Waller French, the secretary of the New York City branch of the NAACP, “there [was] . . . an unusual amount of unnecessary roughness on

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the part of the elevator and subway guards in the Harlem District.”85 Such exchanges often developed into outright physical confrontations. In 1919, two white men, according to Dr. M. L. Ogan, an eyewitness, beat up a black man in the subway near 142nd Street. The police arrested the black man, who had allegedly called the white men names after they stepped on his feet. Dr. Ogan’s wife explained that her husband and she “d[id] not believe this man should suffer; the others appearing as aggressors.” Enveloped in the brutality of the Red Summer, she warned, “the city might be plunged into a so-called ‘race riot’ by just such unpunished conduct.” Gauging the ire of the black community correctly, Ogan argued that the white men “not the colored man, should be ‘made an example of,’ as the magistrates are so fond of handing to the Negro.”86 In this regard, Mrs. Ogan acknowledged how both white civilians and the state doubly and divergently violated blacks’ civil rights. By making “an example” of blacks, magistrates both criminalized blacks’ efforts to defend themselves and authorized white civilians’ assaults on black people. On October 18, 1921, Tom Morton, a black man residing at 235 West 130th Street, entered John Kane’s restaurant at 128th Street and Third Avenue. After the employee refused to serve Morton and insulted him, Morton “struck [the] employee . . . with a pitcher or some other utensil.” A year later, two black women, foreshadowing the defiance of Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up their seats. On the day after the Fourth of July, Frank Morris, Frances Tarris, of 64 West 129th Street, and Flora Bryant, of 225 West 140th, rejected a white man’s request that they “remove some of their belongings from one of the seats, so that an elderly white woman might sit down.” Appalled, an unidentified white man “told the negroes they would not dare act as they were acting if they were in the South.” When Patrolman McGough arrived in response to the whistle blowing of a motorman, he found black women and men “threatening the other occupants.”87 They refused to allow white people to demarcate the boundaries of their freedom by claiming public places as their own and by defending their own right to sit wherever they chose.88

“This Offensive Conduct Hurts the Race”: Social Reform, Uplift, and Respectability Pre–World War I migrations to the North sparked reform movements in various cities to help migrants adjust to urban life. Though filled with reform fever, black activists had to come to grips with a scornful scientific racism that rationalized entrenched poverty in black districts as the result of blacks’ inferiority and immorality. As historian Michelle Mitchell explains,

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“mainstream medical discourse charged that poor health, disregard of hygiene, and venereal disease among African Americans primed the race for extinction.”89 Along this line of reasoning, blacks’ health, sex, and social habits, as well as their intellectual capacity explained their economic, social, and political circumstances. In this context, black New Yorkers aimed to create respectable and moral neighborhoods attentive to urban issues that stymied racial progress. Harlem’s army of black reformers, journalists, religious leaders, and concerned citizens targeted Harlemites’ attendance at the theaters, dance halls, and cabarets, and especially their questionable public behavior in Harlem and around New York City. As James Weldon Johnson and others believed, segregation in the city was in part the result of Harlemites’ misbehavior in public places. Black reformers and civil rights leaders interpreted Harlemites’ defiance of racism in public places, and especially their physical exchanges with belligerent whites, as transgressions of respectability. These Harlemites asserted their community rights by proselytizing religiosity, trumpeting respectability, and denouncing immorality. Thus, while some blacks expressed their community right to revel in the black metropolis’s pleasure resorts, black reformers and spokespersons enacted theirs through uplift strategies to counterbalance alleged distasteful public behavior and disreputable public entertainment. Blacks’ gradual settlement into Harlem incited recurring interracial clashes, particularly gang violence in 1907, 1909, and 1911.90 Concerned about the reputation of the race, as well as the safety and well-being of respectable blacks, the New York Age complained in 1910, “we are constantly mortified by the conduct of young Negroes in various parts of the city and especially in the neighborhoods where Negroes live in large numbers.” The black weekly asserted that “bad characters” and immoral behavior “g[a]ve a hurtful advertisement [of] the race to street-car passengers and passing pedestrians. This offensive conduct hurts the race in ways and in a measure little dreamed of by the young men and casual observer.”91 The Age, therefore, proffered an alternative form of public behavior that symbolized dignity and respectable black masculinity. “It is more obligatory upon Negroes than upon other sorts of people to so conduct themselves in places of public amusement, accommodations and transportation as gentlemen—modest, quiet, unobtrusive, but without fear or subservience—because any display of vulgarity, uppishness, bumptiousness, attracts attention more readily to them than to others, because of their color.” As the Age admitted, “Conduct in such places which would pass unnoticed or be laughed out of countenance when exhibited by a white person is promptly resented when exhibited by a black person often with serious consequences.” So while the black weekly abhorred misconduct,

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it understood that white society punished innocuous public behavior and that the consequences of such behavior unduly outweighed the offense of the public act.92 The Age’s commentary on black masculinity and public conduct was usually tethered to the question of intraracial crime—an issue that was always complicated by the persistence of police brutality. Committed to establishing a respectable community, the New York Age promoted law and order in Harlem. The Age believed that indecent behavior and criminality were characteristic of all racial and ethnic groups as well as all social classes. The black weekly, therefore, was unsurprised by crime in Harlem and asserted, “the rapid development of the Negro population of the Harlem district of New York City . . . was bound to attract a large undesirable element out of sympathy with the dominant sentiment of the people.”93 But the matter of protecting the black community from crime in the context of police negligence and police violence constantly posed a dilemma. The Age knew that the police wantonly and indiscriminately arrested black men. As the Age stated pithily, “‘A soft answer turneth away wrath,’ but a hot temper often leadeth straight to Sing Sing [prison].”94 The New York Age believed that black police officers could check the quagmire of intraracial crime and police repression in Harlem. The Age contended, “there should be Negro policemen in Harlem. The honest people in the district are entitled to protection from the lawlessness, the rowdyism of the undesirable element among them, such as honest people in other districts.”95 Blacks’ incendiary public behavior was often matched by and irreverently cultivated in Harlem’s public amusements, opined black religious leadership. The black church tried to save its parishioners and the black community from their own self-destructive habits, such as drinking, dancing, and theatergoing. Reverend Charles S. Morris, the Abyssinian Baptist Church’s pastor from 1902 to 1908, was known for his famous sermons, such as the “The Curse of Rum” and “The Harm of Gambling.” For the black religious community, sexual restraint, temperance, and modest manners not only embodied the values of Christianity but also the traits of respectable citizens. At the Emancipation celebration in 1910, Abyssinian Baptist Church’s new pastor, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., proclaimed that the “race is dancing itself to death.” Powell regretted black youth’s loss of “grace and modesty.” Rather than embodying moral precepts of the church, blacks “feed on . . . trash,” such as the Tango, the Chicago, the Turkey Trot, and the Texas Tommy, which were all popular dances style of the day. In 1907, sociologist R. R. Wright, Jr., claimed that as blacks “become accustomed to the life of the city, . . . they begin to fall away from the Church.”96 To make matters worse, preached Powell, ragtime music

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and salacious dances influenced their “conversations . . . [and] the movement of their bodies about the home and the street.”97 According to Powell, the music and dancing bedeviled listeners and participants; the race, in this way, controlled neither their own bodies nor their own speech, implicating them in public disgrace and undermining the sanctity of the home. Black ministers complained that cheap amusements poisoned the church’s congregation and stifled the church’s work. To reclaim their souls and recoup their congregants that had “fallen away,” an assembly of black ministers preached to an audience of men at the Crescent Theater on West 135th Street in 1910. The ministers represented a range of denominations; the meeting at the Crescent numbered the third of a series. They held the other two meetings at churches located in Harlem and the Tenderloin district, St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church and Abyssinian Baptist Church, respectively. Reverend Dr. M. W. Gilbert, pastor of the Mt. Olivet Baptist Church who presided over the event, titled his sermon “The Wages of Sin.” The pastors also showed a religious film, titled Star of the East. They smartly learned that reclaiming the theater could serve their own goals. In a metropolis like Harlem, black ministers had to take the message to the people. As Reverend Gilbert explained to a New York Age reporter, “we intend in the future to see that the church seeks the sinners instead of waiting for sinners to seek the church.”98 More than a decade later in Harlem, black churches still faced the same problems. One minister of the Shiloh Baptist Church on West 132nd Street believed that “moving pictures theatres and pool rooms [we]re the greatest obstacles of the church.”99 During his Saturday morning sermon on February 12, 1927, Harlem’s Reverend Elder M. C. Strachan, pastor of the Second Seventh Day Adventist Church, called the theaters “nurseries of vice, seminaries of crime.” According to Strachan, “the public theatre and playhouse is one of the most powerful influences working today to corrupt the minds of church members.”100 The church’s congregation so vehemently disapproved of its members frequenting movie theaters that they unanimously voted to expel any member found doing so. Some black ministers built institutional churches devoted to providing welfare services to satisfy migrants’ social needs and to provide the black community alternative, respectable recreation. In 1898, Reverdy C. Ransom established the first institutional church in Chicago.101 According to Wright, Ransom combined “social and religious work [so] as not only to reach newcomers . . . but all classes, and to serve its local community regardless of the church affiliations of the individuals making it up.”102 In New York City, St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church, located on West Fifty-Third Street, offered services to the community at large. Since 1901, the church had been op-

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erating missions in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Each year, the church donated “large sums for the benefit of the poor, not only of its own membership, but regardless of race, color, or creed.” To offset the number of black women “fallen victim to unscrupulous employment agents,” St. Mark’s Epworth League, an uplift association, planned to establish a “protective home” for “self-respecting girls compelled to earn their own livelihood.” The Epworth League hoped that the home would be used as a space to prepare black women for city life. The object of the Epworth League was “not only to establish a home for such girls, but to seek them upon their arrival in the city.” The church also formed a junior department of the Epworth League for children, ranging between seven and fourteen years of age.103 The children attended sewing classes and distributed flowers and delicacies to the sick. Black leaders entreated the religious community to adopt the methods of institutional churches. In 1909, the New York Age charged that “the Negro churches of New York are not meeting, nor are they making the effort to meet, the neighborhood conditions they should.” The Age saluted the work of Ransom’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, saying “they have saved a score of young women from their lives of wretchedness,” as “every other large Negro church in New York could and should do.” “The districts,” lamented the Age, “such as those centering around Thirty-seventh street and One Hundred and Thirty-fifth street seem never to have occurred to our churchmen as fruitful fields in which they are in duty bound to labor.”104 Years later in the early 1920s, Reverend Powell echoed the Age’s clarion call. Powell hoped that Abyssinia church would provide an intellectual and moral bridge for young adults to enter institutions of higher learning. “Thousands of Negroes are coming to Northern cities each year, who,” according to Powell, “are too old to be reached by the public schools and too poorly informed to enter universities.” This population had the potential to either help or hinder the social station and spiritual well-being of the black community. Powell preached, “Man seeks the fellowship of other human beings, as surely as water seeks its level. If he cannot find the fellowship he craves with good men he will find it with bad ones.” Migrants, who had no social outlet or knowledge of their environs, needed the church’s moral and social guidance. For southern and Caribbean migrants had within them “tremendous undeveloped possibilities,” which could be realized through education, specifically classes in English, reading circles, and lecture courses. The role of the modern black church, Powell admonished, was to become a social and intellectual center that could educate wayward adults about the ways of a city that, Powell propounded, had “gone wild like an uncaged beast of the jungle.”105

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Black reformers and interracial social agencies also complemented black churches’ efforts to provide desperately needed services to migrants and native black New Yorkers. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Victoria Earle Matthews, a leader of the black women’s club movement, created a social service agency for the city’s burgeoning black population. The black women’s club was instrumental in providing a variety of services to black children, the poor, and the unwell, as well as mobilizing neighborhood resources to provide basic educational and job training to denizens most in need. Matthews’s pioneering work exemplifies the club movement’s commitment to racial uplift and community building, as well as to the protection of the propriety of black women. In 1892, Matthews helped establish the first black women’s club in New York City, the Women’s Loyal Union of Manhattan and Brooklyn. She also organized the first national conference of African American women, assisted in the formation of the National Federation of African-American Women in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1895, and chaired the executive board of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.106 In 1897, Matthews founded the White Rose Mission on East NinetySeventh Street between Second and Third Avenues. After the death of her son, Matthews “moved by the great need of the children growing up in large numbers, with little or no training,” opened up the settlement house.107 She visited families between Fifty-Ninth and 127th Streets from Park to First Avenues, aided mothers in household maintenance, and gave “them economical and healthful alternatives” to their own consumer habits.108 These efforts formed the basis of White Rose Mission, which operated as a neighborhood institution offering a range of services and programming to the community, such as music and art classes for children and vocational classes in home economics—including cooking, sewing, gardening, and dressmaking—for women as preparation for domestic work. The mission’s board of directors included a coterie of white reformers, such as Mary Stone, Grace Hoadley Dodge, Frances Kellor, and Mary White Ovington, as well as black leaders, such as Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and Booker T. Washington.109 Concerned about the welfare of black women new to the city, Matthews pioneered the White Rose Travelers’ Aid Society in 1901, the city’s first such society devoted to helping black women navigate the dangers of the big city. In the spring of 1898, Matthews received a letter from a white teacher in Jacksonville, Florida, requesting that Matthews meet a black woman arriving to New York City. When Matthews reached the destination, she found no one. As Mary L. Lewis, the former president of the board of the directors of the mission, recalled, “one of the unprincipled men who haunted the wharves

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in those days managed to seize upon the girl and lure her away from the wharf.”110 Within three days, the woman appeared “extremely upset,” telling “of having been ‘lured’ away by employment agents.”111 After this unfortunate incident, Matthews promised “that as far as she was able to prevent it, no other strange girl of her race would be left to land in New York City unprotected.”112 Thereafter, she placed dock agents at the New York City and Norfolk, Virginia, piers. The mission saw itself as a haven for the “stranger girl” in the city. Although unscrupulous employment agencies posed problems, the mission also questioned the preparedness of the migrants, such as the “irresponsible, destitute girl who left her simple, country home” or the “girl from the respectable Southern home, desirous of perfecting herself in sewing or cooking.”113 The mission, therefore, aimed to shield the women from their own naiveté and lack of readiness for city life. Its work reflected the black community’s concerted efforts to safeguard the propriety of black women. The migration of black women in the pre–World War I period to the urban North as well as whites’ relentless interrogation of black women’s respectability placed the black community on the defensive. In a 1920 leaflet, entitled “An Appeal to Our Friends,” the mission publicized itself as a shelter that offered “PROTECTION against city evils” and supplied the stranger girl with “A CLEAN, respectable HOME.”114 As a community institution, the mission provided the women vocational training and other educational services, and more importantly uplifted the race by housing black women in a supervised environment away from the perils of the streets. While the mission played an important role in the black community, it also struggled to secure funding. Its survival depended upon the largess of benefactors. With the passing away of Matthews in 1907, the mission continued its work under the leadership of Mary L. Stone. In 1918, the Mission moved from 86th Street to West 136th Street in Harlem. In the postwar period, the economic downturn forced the mission to cut some of its programs. As a 1920 leaflet explained, the mission had “been greatly handicapped on account of the war. The classes in Kindergarten, Manual Training, Cooking and Sewing were abolished two years ago on account of lack of funds.”115 Harlem’s predominately working-class population, despite the contributions of affluent whites and middle-class blacks, could not wholly subsidize the mission. Like other black-led institutions, the mission alone could not serve all of Harlem’s black community. As Reverend Ransom opined in 1910, the migration from the South to the North had created “a moral and social problem demanding the best efforts of both races for its solution.”116

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The New York Urban League and Community Politics Throughout the late nineteenth century, poverty in the nation’s urban centers was widespread. During the Progressive era, social reformers, politicians, and academics questioned the virtue of industrial capitalism and sought remedy for the deplorable living conditions of large populations of immigrants from Europe. The “Negro Question” also prompted much inquiry, as well as igniting vigorous debates about the basic humanity of black people. By the turn of the century, as some social scientists discarded hereditarian theories of black inferiority, white racial liberals often replaced biological assertions with cultural ones to explain poverty and crime within the black communities. Despite this shift from biological determinism, many white reformers still placed blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy; during the Progressive era, many of these same racial liberals would ally with black reformers to uplift the city’s ever-rising black populations.117 In New York City, three social welfare agencies, the National Association for the Protection of Colored Women (founded in 1905), the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions for Negroes in New York City (founded in 1906), and the Committee on Urban Conditions (founded in 1910), formed to respond to the ever-growing black population. Though minor in comparison to the Great Migration, the pre–World War I migration and interracial conflicts over housing space and labor competition instigated the 1900 race riot and a string of interracial skirmishes in 1905 and thereafter across black Manhattan. By the summer of 1911, the three organizations consolidated their efforts, founding the National League for Urban Conditions Among Negroes (NLUCAN). Responding to the immediacies of the prewar migration and then the Great Migration, the league created preventive programs for boys and girls and assisted blacks in forming their own self-help organizations. These programs tried to counterbalance both the flood of migrants arriving to the city and the unmet needs of long neglected black New Yorkers. The league also aspired to desegregate the city’s social services agencies as well as to coordinate its programs, services, and research findings with other city agencies.118 The Urban League envisioned its work as making migrants responsible and dutiful citizens. Like many of their contemporaries, the league’s black and white reformers proposed to equip blacks with the know-how to survive the urban frontier and articulated its general aims through a discourse of citizenship and community ethos. For example, in 1915, founder Ruth Standish Baldwin stated: “We seek to make a better New York for everybody to live in

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and to help some measure towards a true realization of the ideals of sound community living in our great Republic.”119 In this way, blacks could make claims to citizenship though self-help and community building. Similarly, James H. Hubert, the executive secretary of the NYUL, explained, “it is my conviction that the biggest service the professional social worker can render a community is that of securing and enlisting a large number of lay workers; that his ultimate aim should be to work himself out of a job.”120 Yet some league officials understood its work as a form of white paternalism. Accordingly, white reformer Arthur C. Holden, the chairman of the executive board of the New York Urban League, opined in 1925 that blacks needed the tutelage of Europeans: There are great masses of Colored people in our country who have never known responsibility and who understand practically nothing of the problems of mass economic life. We believe that these people must prepare themselves for the task and for the opportunity that is theirs. We believe the better educated group of European stock who have had the experience and opportunity of responsibility can by tolerance, understanding, and encouragement assist the descendants of the African Negro to fit themselves for their responsibilities of citizenship.121

Holden, like other white reformers, believed that the legacy of blacks’ slave heritage and rural background ill prepared them for citizenship. The league’s evolutionary theory of citizenship constructed blacks as servants of the community and as citizens in the making. Although migrants could now vote in the city’s elections, many white and black reformers questioned their fitness to do so; citizenship, in this sense, was a responsibility that could be fulfilled only through preparation, such as the community work that blacks put into building Harlem. In 1929, James H. Hubert, the executive secretary of the NYUL, reiterated its commitment to “work not as colored people, nor as white people for the narrow benefit of any group alone, but TOGETHER, as common citizens of our common city, our common country.”122 By focusing on blacks’ and whites’ joint efforts to transform the city and the nation, Hubert highlighted their shared responsibility to fulfill their duties as citizens. The league’s rhetoric primarily spoke to reformers’ concerns about race and particularly to ways that migration and urbanization reinforced racist stereotypes of black men and black women. The large migrant female to male ratios, the prevalence of prostitution, and the rising rates of child delinquency especially marked Harlem as a ghetto.123

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The league tried to establish community responsibility by eliciting the aid of block associations and neighborhood programs. In the 1910s and 1920s, the league became affiliated with various block associations in the black district.124 In the mid-twenties, homeowners on West 136th Street between Seventh and Morningside Avenues formed a block association, which required members to participate in neighborhood upkeep and other community endeavors that demonstrated the neighborhood’s respectability and orderliness. The association ensured that the block was clean and that citizens were well mannered and accountable to the associations’ agenda. As Madge Headley, a researcher for the Institute of Social and Religious Research, observes, “Wellorganized, the association persuaded or forced owners to remove objectionable businesses and signs, carrying one case through the courts. . . . Owners were encouraged to keep homes in repair, both outside and in. Details are looked after, such as the keeping of window shades even, the polishing of brass railings, keeping awnings clean, back yards in order, fences painted.”125 Block associations’ efforts signaled the community’s individual and collective civic consciousness and respectability. Public behavior, as historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham notes, “wield[ed] the power either to refute or confirm stereotypical representations and discriminatory practices.”126 The block association therefore enforced community discipline, as an extension of their community right and commitment to neighborhood beautification. Block leaders also encouraged boys to behave responsibly, discouraging “loud talk or excessive hilarity on the street.” By managing boys’ behavior, the block leaders not only hoped to instill in them appreciation for tranquility and respectability but also to prepare them to be law-abiding men. In 1914, the league created a youth police auxiliary club, hoping, like the Age, to stem the tide of interracial gang violence that erupted as whites tried to halt the “negro invasion” to Harlem. But rather than discursively policing black public behavior, the league tried to redirect and channel it toward community building. Charles C. Allison, the secretary of Big Brother Work, a program that connected fatherless boys with adult male role models, established the Juvenile Park Protective League in Harlem so that boys would “cooperate with city departments to make the city better and cleaner.”127 The JPPL patrolled the neighborhood for unlit hallways, obstructed fire escapes, litter in the streets, and other violations of city ordinances. The boys performed “regular drills under the direction of police officers” and were given badges “for meritorious service to the city.”128 The protective league was so “successful that white boys clamored to join the squads.” The JPPL temporarily mitigated interracial conflict between black and white youth, who had drawn a “death line” past “which neither white nor colored boys dared go un-

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protected.” Through this male youth association, the League taught the boys to serve their communities as responsible citizens, and especially to respect the police department. The JPPL also endeavored to imbue black boys with a reserved masculinity, expressed by an abiding faith in law and order and an unrelenting commitment to their civic responsibilities. The league hoped that the drills and lessons taught black boys how to be responsible men—even in the face of white violence and police brutality.129 Under the auspices of the league, a group of black women found the Utopia Neighborhood League. In 1915, with the approval of the State Board of Charities, the UNL established the Sojourner Truth House for delinquent girls at 15 West 131st Street. In addition to their work with the Sojourner Truth House, the women also helped to increase facilities allocated for black girls in other institutions. The UNL established a child welfare center in Harlem, which made “life worth living for the mother who must work to support herself and children,” according to an officer of the UNL.130 They also furnished a boarding house for babies whose mothers worked by the week or in the suburbs and an educational center for prenatal care and training for young mothers.131 With these “preventive” measures, the league and its affiliated community associations tried to offset escalating cases of black girls and boys being committed to reformatories, to alleviate the dilemma of childcare for working families, and to teach newcomers and black New Yorkers social habits that buoyed the esteem of the black community. The NYUL’s agenda involved more than transforming Harlem and the city through self-help. It also tried to desegregate public and private social agencies. Before the war’s end, the league formed new programs and expanded others that encouraged municipal and private social agencies to open their doors to black clients. As the NYUL’s 1920 annual report stated, “it is the policy of the League to direct other agencies to the needs of the Negro population. It does only that which other agencies cannot be induced or stimulated to do, and stands ready at all times to turn over such activities to accredited agencies or committees.”132 This policy encouraged social agencies either to render services to black clients or to invest resources in black-led neighborhood associations. The league, for example, created recreational programs and facilities for Harlem’s children and in 1911, it “conducted an experimental playground in Harlem, to demonstrate to the City Department of Parks that there was a need for such opportunities for recreation in this district.”133 In 1919, the league formed a Committee of Recreation, which collected seven thousand signatures and submitted them to the park commissioner, along with a petition to the city’s Board of Estimate for a public playground in Harlem. In the same year, the Parks and Playground Association (PPA) paid the

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salary of a black “Playstreet Supervisor” and provided play equipment for children in the league’s backyard.134 While the Committee of Recreation provided activities for mothers, the Playstreet supervisor took the children on “excursions” to parks throughout the city. The league, with the support of the Mayor’s Committee of Women, gave 250 mothers with children boat rides throughout the month of August of 1923.135 By 1929, the PPA still financed the recreational program in the league’s backyard.136 In ten years of cooperation with PPA, little had changed. The PPA consistently provided resources and equipment, but although the PPA’s contributions over the years served hundreds of black children, the city’s Department of Parks had yet to build a playground in Harlem. The league also offered childcare and public health services to the black community. For example, in March of 1915, it conducted a “Negro Health Week” campaign. League social workers and volunteers distributed health literature to eighteen thousand black families, held three mass meetings, and lectured in “practically all churches and Sunday Schools.”137 In 1920, the league cooperated with the Maternity Center Association and established a Prenatal Clinic and a Visiting Nurses Center. Operating out of the Henry Street Settlement, the center provided women, especially working mothers, maternity information during and after pregnancy.138 The NYUL also gave medical information and treatment to Harlemites. Throughout the 1920s, the New York Health Department, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association, as well as many other agencies, donated their resources and expertise to the league during Health Week. Yet blacks continued to be treated unfairly. Many of the city’s private welfare agencies continued to exclude blacks from their facilities or offered blacks segregated and unequal accommodations; municipal agencies, on the other hand, often donated their resources to the league because the city government was reluctant to create and staff health and recreational centers in Harlem to serve the community on a regular basis. Through the league’s efforts, Harlemites received a range of services and information from private organizations and municipal departments throughout the city and Greater New York. But in spite of the League’s activism and coaxing, private and city agencies still treated blacks as second-class citizens.139 The league’s cooperative efforts opened doors to other advantageous relationships with city and private agencies. In 1923, the League established a Neighborhood Department, which constructed “contracts with existing agencies in the neighborhood, including block associations and social clubs.”140 The league also collaborated with the Mayor’s Unemployment Committee in the formation of the Federation of Employment Agencies and investigated

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employment opportunities in suburban towns within a twenty-mile radius of New York City.141 These efforts facilitated the exchange of information and resources among social service agencies and enhanced race relations between black and white organizations. In addition, the League surveyed housing and labor conditions and shared its results with various private and city agencies in order to obtain their support for the league’s efforts regarding housing and labor issues. In 1925, for example, the league investigated housing conditions in Harlem for the State Housing Commission to determine if the Emergency Rent Laws should be extended; throughout the 1920s, the league also assisted the New York City Board of Health and the Tenement House Departments.142 By gathering knowledge through empirical investigation, the league tried to “stimulate” the state to remedy Harlem’s housing situation. Through these cooperative efforts, it also hoped to place its members and social workers in influential positions in other social and welfare agencies around New York City.143 Elizabeth Walton, the chair of the NYUL executive board, stated that a major goal of the league was to educate white citizens “as to the Negro ability to serve in social ways, both public and private.” More importantly, the league aspired to “see that Negroes have representation on all social committees or conferences.”144 By placing their apprenticed social workers and members in social agencies city-wide, the league aimed to shape social and public policy. In 1924, the league joined the Welfare Council of New York City, which coordinated welfare agencies throughout the city. James H. Hubert, the NYUL executive secretary, joined as a member of the board of directors. By 1927, representatives of the league served on committees on delinquency, boys’ work, employment, convalescence, and homeless men. It also owned three buildings, which housed its staff of workers and coordinating agencies including the Boy Scouts of America, Manhattan Council Girl Scouts, Henry Street nurses, New York Tuberculosis and Health Association, Brotherhood of Dining Car Employees, the well-baby clinic of the Department of Health, and the Speedwell Society for Convalescent Babies.145 More than a welfare agency and an institution to instill moral uplift, the NYUL extended Harlem’s community infrastructure. Though it placed undue emphasis on the “moral fitness” of blacks, the league consistently contended that structural factors, such as racism in the labor market, plagued Harlem’s black community.146 Yet in spite of the efforts of the league’s and other selfhelp associations, New York City’s health, recreational, and social welfare facilities inadequately served the black community.147

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Conclusion Harlem political culture developed in concert with the founding of the neighborhood’s black community in the early twentieth century. The black district’s spiritual and secular institutional life reinforced blacks’ humanity and individuality as well as cultivated a politics of dignity, which demanded uninhibited access to public places as well as respectful and equitable treatment in and outside of Harlem. The grassroots movement to secure housing in Harlem, the social reform activism of local organizations and the NYUL, and, more broadly, black New Yorkers’ efforts to create a black metropolis before World War I advanced the struggle for community rights during the war and throughout the 1920s. As manifestations of neighborhood-wide forms of racial solidarity, these local campaigns for better and safer housing, economic autonomy, and community respectability represented blacks’ proprietary claims upon Harlem and their aspirations for racial autonomy. Harlemites’ everyday resistance to de facto segregation signaled their rejection of New York–style racism. Their ever-rising and unmet expectations clashed with the virulent racism of whites and white-ethnics over the use and control of residential areas and public places. Subways, restaurants, and especially the streets operated as theaters of war. Before the Great Depression, everyday resistance was the dominant form of civil rights activism in the city. Blacks’ struggles, therefore, reflected the illiberalism of New York City, as well as the limits of local chapters of the NAACP. The nation’s foremost civil rights organization found the city reluctant to enforce the state’s civil rights laws; indeed, the city’s negligence regarding civil rights and social welfare represented the rule rather than the exception. Community politics also exposed the pervasiveness of intraracial strife among Harlemites. Black reformers’ and religious leaders’ local and city-wide campaigns to uplift and reform the black population spoke to their efforts to fulfill their community rights, specifically the right to ensure neighborhood respectability and safety. Northern-style racism meant more than just the exclusion from or inequitable access to public places. Public and private welfare agencies either refused or provided unequal resources to black clients during the height of the Progressive era and the twenties. In this context, the network of black reformers, religious leaders, uplift associations, and civicminded Harlemites strove to provide services to the community while challenging racist stereotypes and popular and academic claims of the inferiority, immorality, and criminality of black people. Racial uplift and clarion calls for neighborhood respectability were often the chosen strategies to address these problems. While these strategies often conflated the self-assuredness

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of black women and men in public and private places with unsavory behavior, they also challenged the severity with which the criminal justice system punished blacks just because of their race and attacked, because the police failed to, the verity of intraracial crime. The problem of crime among blacks was, of course, a symptom of their lowly status at the bottom rung of the city’s economy ladder. Black leaders’ unheeded pleas to Harlemites to support black enterprises, while revealing black consumer power, underlined the economic vulnerably of the black community. Through the influence of syndicates and control of real estate, whites prevented black businesses from securing a foothold in Harlem’s marketplace. Although black consumers held a semblance of power before and immediately after World War I, slumming whites frequenting Harlem night spots effectively checked black consumer power by the 1920s; white proprietors not only catered to white consumers, to the chagrin of black patrons, but also employed blacks in menial positions. As chapters 2 and 4 demonstrate, intraracial tensions between black business owners and black consumers, especially the New York Age’s foreboding about white enterprises’ inadequate employment of black workers, would eventually bolster black solidarity and ready Harlemites for collective action during the 1920s and the Depression era. The confluence of local issues around housing, civil rights, and social reform gives us a glimpse of the obstacles blacks faced and therefore of the complexity and texture of black life. Still in the midst of the dusk of illiberalism and unbridled racism in Gotham city, Harlemites launched the struggle for community rights.

2

“Not to Save the Union but to ‘Free the Slaves’” Black Labor Activism and Community Politics during the New Negro Era

In the Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro issue of the Survey Graphic magazine in 1925, James Weldon Johnson noted nostalgically that during World War I, as a result of a shortage of industrial labor and a decrease in immigration from Europe, black “new-comers did not have to look for work; work looked for them, and at wages of which they had never even dreamed.” In the throes of violence home and abroad, the Great Migration from the South significantly altered race relations in the North and the South. Johnson’s comments capture black leaders’ and black migrants’ optimism about securing work, escaping racialized and sexualized violence, and gaining civil rights in the North. But he also claimed that black New Yorkers were in less danger of losing their jobs than blacks in the Midwest, where they were “engaged in gang labor,” employed “by the thousands in the stockyards of Chicago, by the thousands in the automobile plants of Detroit.” Since Harlemites were hired as individuals rather than “non-integral parts of a gang,” they would not suffer, Johnson opined, from economic downturns in the city’s industries, as would workers in those other cities.1 Johnson’s characterization of the city’s favorable and unique economy masked more than it illuminated. As a propagandist using Harlem as a model of race relations, Johnson overstated the degree to which blacks thrived during World War I and throughout the 1920s. In the same issue of Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, Charles S. Johnson, a University of Chicago trained sociologist and research director for the National Urban League, proffered a more sober and less celebratory portrayal of Harlem’s black working-class economic situation. He revealed that “Negro workers in New York City . . . are by all odds the most available class for personal service positions.” Unlike their black counterparts in Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, Harlem’s proletariats generally did not find work in the city’s major industries. Thus, despite the Great Migration and the decline in European immigration to the United States during and after the Great War, black New Yorkers barely opened the door to the industrial labor force. Throughout the first three decades of the 53

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twentieth century, the majority of Harlemites toiled in the nonindustrial sectors. Blacks worked in menial positions in the city’s residential and commercial buildings, which etched the city’s majestic skyline; they served the nation’s capitalists and their families and friends in their homes and restaurants throughout the city. So while many black newcomers found jobs, the majority of them toiled, as Charles Johnson lamented, in “‘blind alley’ jobs which lead to nothing beyond the merit of long and faithful service.”2 By situating black workers within New York City’s political economy, this chapter delineates the making of Harlem’s black working class and the development of black labor activism from World War I to the Great Depression. Port activity, finance, and small-scale manufacturing structured the city’s economy. The city’s diverse manufacturing sector was characterized by small firms and light industry, such as printing, publishing, and especially clothing, and requiring a large labor force, which was filled by whites and white immigrant groups. Although the Great Migration nearly tripled the size of the black population—making Harlem the largest black urban working-class neighborhood in black America—both the native and immigrant white population’s demographic preponderance and relative control of the labor market gave them the advantage in the competition for jobs in the city. These white laborers often belonged to the same ethnic groups, lived in the same neighborhoods, attended the same religious institutions, and belonged to the same community networks as the subcontractors, gang handlers, and foremen who hired them. These demographic advantages and employer racism confined black workers to the bottom rung of the economic ladder, where black men toiled as elevator operators and black women as domestics, laundresses, and garment workers. With few options in the city’s labor market, black workers, reformers, and labor leaders cautiously looked to the labor movement for new and better job opportunities. During and after World War I, Harlem’s black public sphere both criticized and courted the American Federation of Labor (AFL).3 New Negro labor activists, such as Frank Crosswaith, denounced racism among the city’s white unionists but also encouraged interracial working-class unity in the AFL. By the mid-twenties, however, the postwar recession and black workers’ vulnerable position in the economy induced black reformers and black radicals to shift their tactics. While black labor activists remained suspicious of the AFL’s motives, they focused on placing black workers in trade unions and establishing a substantive relationship with the AFL. Harlem labor leaders and black journalists jumpstarted two campaigns in 1925. First, trade unions and black labor leaders formed the Trade Union Committee for the Organization for Negro Workers (TUCONW). Frank Crosswaith, black socialist and execu-

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tive secretary of the Trade Union Committee, aimed to educate black and white workers about their shared conditions and obstacles as an economic class against capitalists. Although the TUCONW failed to achieve its goals, Crosswaith and other black labor activists agreed that black unity and crossorganizational strategies should function as the basis for labor activism in the black community. Second, black labor activists and neighborhood organizations supported black projectionists in their efforts to obtain positions in Harlem theaters and join the ranks of the Motion Picture Operators Union, Local 306. In September 1926, as newly minted members of Local 306, black projectionist waged a several month-long strike against the Lafayette Theater in Harlem. While arguing for the legitimacy of accepting black unionists in the theater, black labor activists also made their demands based on the theater’s dependence upon black patronage. As chapter 1 demonstrates, since 1916, if not before, black leaders viewed the employment of black workers in local businesses in Harlem as a community right. These community challenges to the Lafayette demonstrate the black community’s growing expectation that theaters and all local businesses in Harlem would be responsible to black consumers and honor Harlemites’ community right to be employed in their community. This groundswell of Harlem labor activism reflected black workers’ and black leaders’ efforts to create an antiracist labor activism rooted in the black community, and resulted in coalitions being built across ideological lines and the chasm between Old and New Negroes being lessened.

Political Economy, Small Firms, and Sedentary Communities Since the seventeenth century, commerce and the city’s port activity shaped New York City’s economy. As historian Kenneth T. Jackson explains, “throughout the first three centuries of Gotham’s history, the cornerstone of its growth was commerce, and the backbone of its economy remained at the water’s edge, from which the city crawled ashore, multiplied, waxed rich, and became an entrepôt of power and culture.”4 By the late eighteenth century, the city had surpassed Philadelphia as the leading port of entry in the nation. In turn, New York City’s port dominance invigorated other areas of the city’s economy, especially banking, insurance, and manufacturing. The majority of these economic activities occurred along the waterfront. Merchants built large warehouses, and insurance companies, accountants, and law firms, as well as wholesalers and retailers rented spaces in town houses. During the 1790s, the settlement of the state’s westward hinterlands and the subsequent building of canals, turnpikes, and bridges facilitated trade to New York City’s harbor.

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After the Civil War, manufacturing further restructured the economy, as a result of the expansion of consumer markets in the West and the extension of railroads across the nation.5 The city’s lack of raw materials, its density, and the growth of the western market made the city unsuitable for heavy industries. Since transportation and the distribution of goods and production sites proved too expensive, the city’s manufacturers “specialized in labor-intensive goods with a high value added relative to their shipping costs.”6 Light manufacturing such as apparel, publishing, and printing, and industries serving the urban consumer market dominated the city’s economy.7 The majority of the city’s firms were small. “As of 1855 roughly two-thirds of the city’s industrial workforce was employed in firms with fewer than a hundred hands, half of them in firms with under twenty-five—big by the standards of 1840,” note historians Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace. Manhattan’s industries were labor-intensive, relying on strength in numbers rather than machines. High real estate costs and banks’ reluctance to lend to small manufacturers forced manufacturers to pay their own start-up and overhead costs. Furthermore, manufacturers preferred cheap labor to costly steampowered machinery. In the early twentieth century, the trend of small establishments continued. Among eight industrial hubs, including Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, New York State had the most industrial establishments and the lowest number of wage earners per establishment. In 1925, New York State had 33,393 industrial establishments, followed by Pennsylvania at a distant second, with 17,298. The majority of the Empire state’s establishments were in New York City, where they numbered 23,714. New York State also had the lowest number of wage earners per establishment (32), with Illinois (44) ranking second. Finally, individuals (46.8 percent) and partnerships (24 percent) owned the majority of New York City’s establishments.8 Although Manhattan was “the small manufacturers’ paradise,” the revolution in finance and banking and the integration of production and mass distribution in American companies completed New York City’s development into the nation’s financial hub in the second half of the nineteenth century. As economist Emanuel Tobier explains, “this managerial revolution enabled Lower Manhattan to become the principal command post of industrial capitalism in the United States.” The “visible hand,” which emerged with the managerial revolution, created a white-collar class of lawyers, bankers, engineers, clerks, accountants, and managers who worked in the city’s commercial and trade districts. Modern entrepreneurial enterprises required a managerial class to “carry on the multitudinous activities involved in producing, marketing, and purchasing a massive volume of goods for national

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and global markets.”9 In order to use urban space efficiently, engineers built vertical buildings to accommodate business transactions among a range of enterprises. Frank Woolworth, chain store magnate, occupied only two floors of his building of fifty-five stories; by 1924, four hundred companies were housed in the Woolworth building. In 1913, Manhattan had fifty-one buildings from twenty-one to sixty stories and nearly one thousand buildings with eleven to twenty stories. In 1929, there were 188 buildings with more than twenty stories, and 2,291 with eleven to twenty stories.10 At the turn of the twentieth century, Manhattan’s manufacturing sector decentralized, scattering to other boroughs and cities around the metropolitan area. The construction of the New York City transit system, Brooklyn’s waterfront, and New Jersey’s superior railroad facilities attracted industries and workers, mainly white ethnics from Manhattan. According to Tobier, as the city’s economy expanded and diversified, high transportation and real estate costs prodded industrialists to consider different and more affordable locations. In 1899, Manhattan had been the site of nearly 75 percent of all industrial jobs; by 1937, that number had dropped to less than 60 percent.11 Industrialists’ dependence on rail and water-borne transportation limited businesses “to locations in the densest portions of central cities.”12 Improvements in the automobile industry enabled manufacturers to reduce transportation costs and to augment their access to markets and supplies. As Manhattan’s industrial economy decentralized, other boroughs’ industrial economies and populations swelled, particularly Brooklyn’s. Between 1899 and 1919, Manhattan’s manufacturing employment rose 36 percent, but manufacturing employment in the other boroughs grew 142 percent.13 Attracted to Brooklyn’s waterfront, manufacturers created industrial sites there. Eager for jobs, white New Yorkers and white immigrants immediately followed capital. European immigrants furnished the labor for the city’s small manufacturers. Since the early nineteenth century, the city had been attracting large numbers of migrants from England, Ireland, and Germany. On the eve of the Civil War, the Irish and German immigrant groups were the largest in the city.14 For the next four decades, more than two hundred thousand immigrants arrived in the city per year.15 Between 1881 and 1914, when two million eastern European Jews migrated to the United States, approximately 75 percent of them settled in New York City. Italians ranked as the second largest immigrant population, entering the city in small numbers during the 1850s and in greater numbers during and after the 1880s; by 1920, first- and second-generation Italians accounted for over eight hundred thousand New Yorkers.16 As Italians and Jews settled into the city before the Great War, they established cultural and kinship networks to ease their transition to the city’s

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urban life. In the 1870s, the padroni, or labor contractors who received a proportion of the laborers’ wages for their services, helped Italian migrants find employment. By 1910, the Italian community had established its own institutional, employment, and cultural networks, diminishing the necessity of the padroni. Similarly, Jews established landsmanshaften organizations, which offered members cultural and religious benefits, life insurance, sickness and death benefits, burial plots, and aid in finding housing and jobs.17 Jewish workers formed trade unions, such as the Workmen’s Circle in 1900 and the Jewish National Workers’ Alliance in 1912; they also founded several hospitals, starting with the Beth Israel hospital in 1889, followed by the Lebanon Hospital, the Beth David Hospital, and the Hungarian People’s Hospital. As Jewish and Italian immigrants settled into the city, they used these cultural, labor, social, medical, and fraternal organizations as an infrastructure to establish themselves in New York City’s economy. European immigrants’ community life was intricately rooted in the local labor market. The nexus between these white ethnic neighborhoods and industrial economies formed what labor historian David Montgomery has called sedentary communities.18 Immigrants established social and cultural ties with their employers, based, in part, on shared ethnicity and community. In the case of Jewish immigrants, workers and subcontractors spoke Yiddish and generally resided in the same part of the city.19 Many Jews perceived labor struggles as community struggles. “Strike actions were initiated to redress specific grievances in an endemically unregulated industry, in scattered workplaces and ‘kitchen and bedroom shops,’” as historian Hadass Kosak describes.20 During labor strikes entire neighborhoods dutifully supported Jewish workers. In 1894, for example, the cloak-makers’ strike included peddlers, express men, and liquor merchants.21 Scattered throughout the boroughs and rooted in neighborhoods harboring workers, managers, and subcontractors from their own ethnic group, white ethnics held a great advantage over black workers in the industrial labor market and effectively insured that black New Yorkers, segregated in distant neighborhoods like Harlem, were shut out from industrial jobs and stuck in the personal and service sector. These traditions of cultural and labor solidarity in sedentary communities disadvantaged blacks in the workplace.22 White native and immigrant employers’ hiring practices reflected their loyalty to, and undoubtedly the community pressures from, their respective neighborhoods. The large majority of white immigrant workers shaped foremen’s and contractors’ hiring practices. Established in sedentary communities, white foremen developed relationships with gangs that were “of mutual fidelity”; managers hired their coreligionists and members of their ethnic groups first and hired blacks last.

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If a foreman hired a black longshoreman rather than an Italian, the foreman severed the bond of loyalty. Stevedores, gang handlers, and foremen, therefore, “would not take such chances,” for such acts of disloyalty were “worthy of death.”23 As historian David Montgomery concludes, “the familiar faces who were known and who obtained places on ‘good gangs,’ and even those who stood in reserve, included many from families who lived there [Irish in the Chelsea area or Italians in Brooklyn’s Red Hook] from the 1850s to the 1950s.”24

The World of Work during World War I and the 1920s Black New Yorkers, as historian Wilder describes, “were caught in an atypical job market in which they could be doctors and lawyers but not plumbers or builders; maids and porters but not secretaries and clerks.”25 Shut out of white ethnic sedentary communities, blacks strove to find meaningful employment as they confronted employers and native and ethnic white workers firmly committed to excluding them. Wartime labor shortages and immigration restrictions improved black New York’s economic situation. Individually and with the help of neighborhood reform institutions, blacks gradually opened the door to the industrial labor force. As black men steadily made headway into construction, longshore work, and other industries, black women bounded into women’s apparel and related industries during World War I. But by the end of the 1920s, black women were once again scrambling to find jobs in the industries that were only recently open to them, as soldiers, black and white, returned to the workforce after the war. During the war and into the twenties, employment agencies and social welfare institutions aided blacks in finding employment. Both optimistic and desperate, black migrants used state and private employment agencies as well as the services of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) to find work.26 They also used other connections or associations that might help them gain a foothold in securing a decent job. J. Raymond Jones, a Harlem politician, remembered campaigning for the reelection of Mayor John Hylan in 1925 and the mayor’s office sending “a letter to Mr. William Egan, the stationmaster at the Pennsylvania Railroad”: the result was Jones’s gaining a position as a “political Red Cap” at Pennsylvania Station. But without some kind of connection, blacks immediately learned that obtaining a job in the city was difficult. The Urban League played a significant role in providing a variety of services to black workers.27 In 1919, the league successfully “induce[d] the State to establish a Public Employment Bureau in Harlem,” as blacks struggled to

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find employment in the midst of the postwar recession.28 In 1920, many black women returned to domestic work, and for those unfamiliar with such work, the NYUL placed them in homes under their supervision. The league began a “Stay-in-School” drive, and advised juvenile workers, boys and girls below the age of twenty, to remain in school instead of working. The NYUL also sent speakers to parents’ association meetings urging them to keep “their children in school, during the industrial crisis.” As the recession persisted, the league continued its programs, offered educational classes to boys and girls, and persuaded the Department of Public Welfare (DPW) to hire a social worker to assist them in finding employment for black workers; thereafter, the DPW opened an Industrial Aid Bureau that gave assistance to blacks searching for work.29 In 1925, the New York Urban League redesigned its employment bureau to accommodate skilled and professional blacks. The NYUL explained, “while we recognize the value of making placements in occupations such as domestic and other forms of personal service, commonly held and easily obtained by Negro workers, we realize that the specific task of the League is that of creating new openings in the skilled trades.”30 In 1926, the league stopped placing domestic workers; in the same year, the League placed 35 percent of the applicants in skilled positions; in 1927, the figure was 28 percent, and in 1928, it was 19 percent. Undoubtedly, the decrease revealed the league’s difficulty in obtaining employment for skilled and professionally trained blacks, as well as the early ripples of the Great Depression.31 The league’s shift to assisting skilled and professional workers also represented, as historian Toure Reed argues, its “intragroup class skew.” Despite its reasoning, the league shut its doors to the most needy, blacks with the least resources and cultural capital. The league’s decision-making was indicative of its class bias and more broadly, its aspirations to find “respectable work” for the black community.32 The marginal results of the league’s efforts reflected the stubborn racism blacks workers faced in the labor market. As blacks diligently canvassed the employment section of the newspapers and business districts in Harlem, lower Manhattan, and other boroughs, they read in black and white employers racial and ethnic preferences. Langston Hughes, Missourian and Harlem poet laureate, remembered arriving in the city in 1921 and “f[inding] it very hard to get work in New York.” As Hughes explained, “nine times out of ten— ten times out of ten, to be truthful—the employer would look at me, shake his head and say, with an air of amazement: ‘But I didn’t advertise for a colored boy.’”33 Newspaper job announcements advertised positions specifying ethnicity, color, and racial preferences. Some employers requested West Indians, considering them more industrious than black Americans. For instance, one

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employer advertised, “I want a very good shipping clerk (light colored only) (West Indian preferred) not over 25 years old.”34 Some employers preferred light-complexioned blacks because white patrons considered them “less offensive” and more exotic. In one case, an employer hired “yellow or fair” waitresses because they fit “the interior better than darker women,” while another employer asserted that lighter-complexioned women “make the place appear interesting.”35 Black domestics especially faced employers who objectified them. In what became known as the slave market, white women handpicked domestics along street corners, often treating black women like animals. “Jewish women used to come and—almost just like slavery days—feel their muscles, look at their knees to see if they had crust on their knees,” lamented Black Nationalist and reparations activist Audley Moore. Whites read black women’s bodies as texts that chronicle their work habits and work ethic. As Moore noted, many employers believed that crust ensured that domestics “would get on their knees to wax” the floor.36 Educated and even professionally trained blacks also struggled to secure work for which they were qualified. As one South Carolinian lamented, “I didn’t know the swing was different up here. I was hoping to get some kind of light work in a store or someplace like that. Thought I wouldn’t have any trouble since I’d been through Penn School.”37 Caribbean migrants, the majority of whom arrived as skilled workers and professionals, also ran into barriers. As historian Winston James explains, “the most remarkable feature of the socio-economic profile of the early migrants . . . is the high proportion who, in their country of origin, held professional, white collar, and skilled jobs.”38 Despite this, many black immigrants toiled in menial positions. As a West Indian woman recalled ruefully, “and just to think, I was principal of a school of 300 pupils for eight years, with five teachers under me, and all I can get in this country is maid’s work.”39 As Dr. Herman Warner, a Harlemite, noted, “you could go into an apartment house, and the elevator man would have a doctorate. It was a common thing—a Ph. D. couldn’t get work.” Harold Ellis, another Harlemite, too recalled struggling to get his medical practice underway after graduating from McGill University in Canada in 1920. As Ellis remembered, “Since I didn’t have any money to start up, I went to work as a cook’s assistant up in Massachusetts. . . . I came back to New York to the hotel on Central Park West, and I went back to work as an elevator operator. With a medical license!”40 *

*

*

Black men faced formidable obstacles in the labor market. Transformations in the men’s clothing industry and in construction explain black men’s

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difficulties in obtaining work in the city’s diverse industries. During the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the clothing industry supplied the majority of manufacturing jobs, but by the eve of the Great War, its total workforce in Manhattan declined. Thus, between 1909 and 1929, the men’s clothing industry average dipped from 49,915 wage earners to 19,803.41 As economist Herbert R. Northrup explains, “the failure of the Negroes to enter this industry is attributable to the fact that employment has not increased since World War I, the period in which Negroes first entered the needle trades in large numbers.”42 In spite of these obstacles, black men made considerable advances in the industrial sector. From 1910 to 1920, their proportion of workers in that sector increased from 11.8 to 20.6 percent; thereafter, because of the return of soldiers home from the war effort, it improved only slightly and amounted to just 22.1 percent by 1930.43 But black New Yorkers advances were nominal in comparison to blacks in Chicago, the second largest urban black population in the North. The industrial economies of Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh were capital intensive and structured around basic industries, such as meatpacking, auto, and steel, respectively. In Chicago labor shortages created employment opportunities for migrants in the meatpacking and steel industries. The black workforce at U.S. Steel’s Gary Indiana Works increased from 407 in 1916 to 1,295 by 1918.44 According to the 1930 Census, 10.8 percent of black male Chicagoans found jobs in skilled and foreman positions, 7.8 percent semiskilled, and 19.5 percent unskilled in manufacturing. At each skill level, black men in New York City comprised a lower proportion of the industrial labor force (9.1 percent, 5.4 percent, and 9.9 percent, respectively) than their counterparts in Chicago. In the first two categories, the percentages are relatively similar, but in the unskilled category Chicago’s percentage almost doubles New York City’s. These differences underline the combined impact of racism, demographics, and political economy on the city’s black male workers. As historian Jacqueline Jones explains, “By 1930 two types of workers symbolized the status of all black male wage earners in the urban North—the New York City apartment house janitor and the Pittsburgh foundry worker who manned a blast during the hottest months of the year.”45 The expansion of Manhattan’s white-collar class and business district brought about a greater demand for workers to service office and apartment buildings, railroad stations, and department stores. The two largest categories of employment for black men in 1930 were as porters (11,645, not including stores) and elevator operators (4,988).46 Thus although black men working in industrial centers,

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such as Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh were restricted to the bottom of the industrial labor market, they generally worked in higher earnings sectors of the economy than black New Yorkers. Forrester Washington’s 1916 study for the Urban League of one hundred black building employees in Manhattan provides a glimpse of the experiences of black apartment workers during World War I. Of those one hundred black building employees in Manhattan, sixty-six worked as elevator operators and switchboard operators, and only four as firemen. Most of the workers shared tasks, especially the switchboard and elevator operators. According to Washington, “it is rarely that there is any clear-cut division of labor between the elevator-men and the switch-board men.”47 In only six cases were switchboard operators not working the elevator, and there were only fourteen cases when employees did not at some time perform the duties of the elevator operator.48 Managers expected elevator-men, especially in smaller apartment buildings, to sweep, dust, and mop the lower floors in the morning.49 While black men worked diligently in these buildings, they received little appreciation for their efforts. In the apartment buildings, where both black and white men worked as elevator operators, white tenants often helped white operators to find better paying jobs. According to a building superintendent, “if we have a likely looking white boy on the elevator some tenant will ask him why he is working at a cheap job like that.” When the white boy explains that he took the first job available, “the tenant will put himself out to find the likely looking white boy a job,” often handing him a note “of introduction to some business acquaintance.” Black workers, however, rarely experienced such good fortune. “This wouldn’t happen once in a dozen years to one of my colored men. Consequently we can keep our decent colored boys,” the superintendent concluded.50 In the postwar era, black men worked in a greater range of jobs than before the war, but continued to drudge for long hours and in unmechanized sectors of the city’s economy. Elevator operators and others in these menial positions toiled at an unrelenting pace, completing whatever tasks their employer required of them. Harold Ellis, describing his position as an “indoor aviator,” or elevator operator, in the 1920s, recalled working “Saturday night at six o’clock and you don’t get off until midday Sunday. It was cold at night, and the elevator man didn’t have a room. If you had to sleep, you had to take a nap sitting up in the hall.” Journalist and conservative commentator George Schuyler similarly, described his dishwashing job as “dangerously close to slavery.” Like elevator operators, dishwashers had to perform multiple tasks, at an unremitting work pace. “It was a workhouse . . . the rush was so great that I needed an

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assistant just to scrape dishes and stack them up before washing and rinsing. There was no time to wipe dishes. They were just piled on slanting shelves to drain and dry,” Schuyler remembered.51 Black dockworkers had similar experiences on the city’s piers in the postwar era. In New York City, the arrival of a ship, the time of which the longshoremen could not exactly ascertain, determined the pace of dock work. Black men could be found “coaling ships,” and trucking freight. Historian Bruce Nelson described blacks’ position in the labor hierarchy as the “most ‘casual’ of the casuals.”52 Once their work began, longshoremen slaved to the clock for “the ship must sail on time.” They drudged incessantly until the end of the day as ships entered and exited piers. As Nelson notes, “the longshoreman waited, and then, if lucky enough to be chosen to work the ship’s cargo, he might face twenty (or thirty, or even more) consecutive hours of frantic effort.”53 John Coleman, a South Carolina Sea Islander, remembered how “one night I was sent in the ship hole for three hours and within that short time I lost the soles of my shoes, stowing freight, including rolled and barb wire. One hour to me was like five.”54 The majority of black longshoremen worked on piers harboring domestic ships, earning the lowest wages and enduring the most arduous working conditions. Assessing work on the coastwise piers, longshoreman Walter S. Bruce explained, “I can say safely without fear of contradiction that this is the hardest and most dangerous work I have ever seen.”55 Black longshoremen labored at the dirtiest and lowliest positions; as Sterling Spero and Abram Harris, authors of The Black Worker, opined, “if there is unpleasant work to do, such as handling ore or dirty goods, the Negro is likely to get the job. If there are two jobs open, one to last a week and another two days, the white man would get the long job.”56 Race and ethnicity shaped all facets of black men’s work experiences, highlighting not only the plight of black men but also how racism privileged white workers. As a black mechanic’s wife lamented in 1926, “My husband has a good job as a mechanic, but because he is colored he is worked to death.”57 Black women also gained some ground in the industrial sector during the Great War.58 From 1910 to 1920, black women’s proportion of the industrial labor force more than tripled (from 8.7 percent to 26.6 percent). As Jessie Clark and Gertrude McDougald plainly state in A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker, “cheap labor had to be recruited somewhere.” Factory owners, employment bureaus, and newspapers “for the first time . . . inserted the word ‘Colored’ before the word ‘wanted.’”59 But the proportion of black women in the industrial sector dipped significantly by 1930 (to 17.2 percent). According to Eugene Kinckle Jones, the decline was the result of “the increases in men’s wages and improvement in the types of jobs available to

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Negro Men.” He also noted that, “there has been an actual reduction in the number of married colored women at work.”60 Yet black women also lost jobs to returning black and white soldiers as well as to white women. For example, beginning in 1919, black men and white women replaced black women as elevator operators. Such shifts in the industrial labor force did not signal a return to prewar conditions. Rather, both sexism and racism marginalized black women, though some married black women were enabled to stay at home as their family’s economic circumstances improved.61 At the same time, however, the proportion of black women in the domestic sector surged from 70.1 percent in 1920 to 76.1 percent in 1930. These statistics help explain why a greater proportion of black women worked in Manhattan than worked in Chicago and Detroit. As historian Jacqueline Jones observes, “where men had access to industrial employment—in Pittsburgh and Detroit, for example— fewer wives worked than those in cities where large numbers of men could find little work outside domestic service.” Although jobs in both sectors were insecure, black men relegated to the service sector were paid much less.62 As day workers and live-in servants, black women worked as pantry maids, janitresses, and chambermaids, though the majority worked as general housemaids, responsible for household maintenance, if not cooking and laundry duties.63 Black women also washed clothes for pay, even as commercial laundries expanded throughout the city; others established their own beauty shops. In his 1928 novel Home to Harlem, Claude McKay represents black women’s entrepreneurialism. The protagonist’s landlady washes the linen of “wealthy patrons.”64 She rents the basement and “appropriate[s] the large backyard for her laundry work,” collecting the linen on Mondays. Dr. May E. Chinn, the first black woman to intern at Harlem Hospital, remembered her mother taking small jobs to supplement her domestic work. As Chinn explains, “she worked as she got jobs. . . . Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and find that she was doing somebody’s laundry. She was serving dinner parties whenever she got a chance.” Her mother took on multiple jobs because her father suffered from episodes of alcoholism and because she wanted to help her daughter complete her education.65 Inspired and impressed by beauty culturist mogul, Madame C. J. Walker, many black women in Harlem and across the country opened their own beauty shops. Among race businesses in Harlem in 1918, hairdressers headed the list. Beautician, Lucille Randolph, the wife of black socialist and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, not only supported but also financed her husband’s labor struggles and his New Negro magazine, the Messenger.66 Black women worked in a variety of jobs in the manufacturing and mechanical sector. In the candy factory, they worked as dippers and packers,

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where they lifted large trays from the table to the machine and back. Some women studded dates and packed eggs. In tobacco factories, they teased out parts of the tobacco that may have become matted in the cutting machine. In millineries, they usually worked as preparers or trimmers’ helpers. Some worked in shops as apprentices and errand girls.67 Black women in garment factories and shops toiled as finishers, pressers, and cleaners. Finishers did most of the stitching inside the garment, while examiners inspected finished garments for mistakes in workmanship; cleaners cut and picked threads from finished garments, and pressers pressed pleats and seams with a large flat iron.68 Some worked in semiskilled positions as operators; a few had skilled positions as designers, sketchers, and forewomen.69 The facilities in the factories were often unkempt. In the flower and feather shops, black women endured dirty floors and feathers floating in the air and suffered from overcrowding and poor ventilation. Paper box factories were dark and poorly ventilated, and the noise from the machinery was deafening. As a stenographer explained to Clark and McDougald, while giving them directions to the paper box workers, “I’ll take you up, but I can’t stay long, the noise is so terrible.” Thirty girls, nevertheless, bundled boxes only two feet from the machines for more than nine hours.70 Factories’ women’s toilets were often unhealthy and unclean; dressing rooms were divided only with thin partitions and had no proper seating arrangements.71 While working long hours, black women soberly chose day-work or industrial jobs to reclaim control over their labor and family time. After the war, few black women earned more than ten dollars per week, and by the end of the twenties, only garment workers earned between ten and twentytwo dollars per week.72 In 1919, black women in the needle trades averaged forty-nine to fifty hours a week. Seventy percent of the garment factories gave their workers an hour lunch period, and 18 percent gave them a half hour.73 By 1929, they toiled forty-nine to fifty-four hours, especially during rush seasons. The majority of domestic and personal service workers labored ten and twelve hours per day; some even worked fourteen hours. The long, arduous hours black women worked detrimentally affected their health and ultimately the black family. As historian David McBride explains, “while black working mothers were a stable social force for the overall black community, the mortality and morbidity rates of these women (and their children) were heightened substantially by gaps in health care resources such as maternity and infant care, as well as their economic poverty.”74 These conditions led some black women to reject “sleep-in” work. To ensure more time with their families, many women desired part-time work, where they worked eight hours per day.75 Toiling under the scrutiny of their employers, black domestics felt

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that their “work was never done.” As live-in servants they worked exhausting hours during which they rarely escaped the “confinement and the friction of a personal ‘boss’.”76 Day-work enabled them to spend more time with their children. As Elise Johnson McDougald, Harlem teacher, proclaimed, the black woman “revolt[ed] against residential domestic service. It is a last stand in her fight to maintain a semblance of family life.”77 Harlem’s black working class, despite the odds, did not face the city’s racist economy, alone. The economic inertia that Harlemites endured prompted them to break labor strikes and when possible, join labor unions. In the midtwenties, inspired by the dire economic circumstances of the black community, black labor leaders and reform organizations joined forces, laying the groundwork for Harlem’s grassroots labor movement.

The Black Worker and the Labor Movement The World War I era indelibly altered the relationship between black workers and the labor movement. The East St. Louis race riot in 1917 and the Chicago race riot in 1919 powerfully broadcasted the conflicts among white workers, the labor movement, and the emergent black communities in the North. While demonstrating black workers’ desire to find better work conditions and higher wages, these riots and labor skirmishes also highlight racism among white workers and blacks’ vulnerable position in the labor movement. The Great Migration pressured both black workers and unions to reassess their relationship. Aggressively seeking a better standard of living, black workers prudently approached unions as both an opportunity for and a barrier to better wages and working conditions. Trade unions, on the other hand, reluctantly welcomed black workers into the fold of the labor movement. Seeking to control the labor market, and to prevent strikebreaking, some locals opened their ranks to black workers primarily to advantage white unionists. Black workers seeking union membership confronted multiple obstacles. High membership dues, apprenticeship rules, and exclusionary clauses in constitutions narrowed the path of blacks to union membership. The Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Employees and Masters, Mates, and Pilots of America barred blacks in its constitution. Mr. Pulliam, a New York representative of the Railway and Steamship Employees, stated that black exclusion was not “willful discrimination.” Pulliam explained, “the constitution was drawn up 35 years ago in New Orleans, Louisiana. . . . You can very well appreciate that situation. . . . It was natural for the Southern white man to put ‘white men’ in the constitution.” Nonetheless, Pulliam neither viewed the exclusion of blacks as unjust nor suggested that the constitution be changed to

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promote interracial unionism in New York City. Rather, he opined, “Negroes had begun to push themselves into this work more and more since the World War and have since become a ‘problem.’”78 By emphasizing the southern origins of the exclusionary clause, Pulliam tried to relieve his local’s complicity. His characterization of blacks’ recent efforts to obtain employment as “a problem” also suggests that some whites believed that they had a proprietary right to the jobs, thereby legitimating the exclusion of black workers. Other unions purposely demanded high membership fees to exclude certain workers. Mr. E. Blake, for example, a business agent for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Local 264, Shirt Makers and Cutters, admitted that “fees were high to limit membership.” Perhaps the major reason for the absence of black workers was because few blacks were employed in the garment industry labor force. As Blake explained, “we do not have any trouble with Negro strike breakers because they can’t do the work.”79 As some white trade unions tried to organize black workers, they encountered a wary black population distrustful of unions’ motives. David Levy, secretary of the Cigar Makers International Union, and M. Simons, its organizer, told Ira A. Reid of the New York Urban League that black workers “seem not to trust any white leaders.” The union used boat rides and picnics to encourage blacks and Puerto Ricans to join.80 Peter Hussy, secretary of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), Local 895, believed, “It is mostly lack of confidence in the organizers.”81 Many blacks’ argued that “white man’s union” invited them to join the labor movement only to benefit white workers. During a strike in April 1924, a union collected three dollars from black painters for an application to join, but once the strike was over, “they were kicked out.”82 A black waiter, residing in New York City for twenty-seven years lamented, “in New York the waiter’s union don’t mean a thing for the colored waiter—instead of helping them it keeps them off the job by not letting them become members.”83 Trade union racism was not the only deterrent impeding black workers from joining labor unions. Many blacks worked at multiple jobs, and therefore did not have time to attend meetings, while others were unfamiliar with trade unionism per se. Of 175 black women in both the domestic and industrial sectors, 71 percent had either never heard of unions or had never been asked to join, according to a 1919 study.84 A representative of the Children and Dress Bath Robe and House Dress Makers Union, Local 91, advised New York Urban League officials to provide black workers with trade union education.85 Others worried about the security of their jobs. In a 1929 study, 51 percent of 207 black female garment workers feared they would lose their positions if they joined unions.86 Blacks held

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firmly onto their jobs, and the blemished record of trade union opportunism only hardened their distrust. Despite their contentious relationship with labor unions, black workers challenged their employers to improve their working conditions and wages. These struggles took multiple forms and involved workers across occupational categories. In 1919, the ILA requested a wage increase from sixty-five cents per hour, with one dollar per hour for overtime, to one dollar per hour, with two dollars per hour for overtime. The shippers rejected the request, claiming that longshoremen had been “inefficient since 1914 and that the previous raises granted far surpassed reasonable rates of increase.”87 The National Adjustment Commission, which negotiated disputes between capital and labor during the war, sought a middle ground and announced that the longshoremen would be given a five-cents increase on straight time and ten cents on overtime. The longshoremen rejected the increases. Black workers were in the middle of the conflict. On October 6, 1919, when the longshoremen defied their national leadership and walked off the piers, interracial and predominantly black locals of the ILA also followed suit.88 Two days later, five thousand longshoremen walked off the North River piers. Once the Chelsea Local 791, the largest ILA local, joined the strike, other locals withdrew their labor and walked off the piers. Cooperation between black unionists and a radical faction of Italian longshoremen, many of them members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who worked on the Bush Terminal docks, also complicated labor strife. As historian Risa Faussette explains, “both groups had tenaciously battled the Irish stronghold in the port in order to secure access to piers, and both groups historically occupied the low end of the waterfront scale.”89 For years, Irish longshoremen had dominated the piers, often prompting Italians and blacks to break strikes. On piers that Italians dominated, on the other hand, blacks and Italians “joined mixed locals, worked the same piers, and at times served on mixed gangs.” Blacks and Italians, then, cultivated bonds through labor as well as in resistance to the exclusionary practices of Irish longshoremen. With neither labor nor capital willing to budge in the October strike, the U.S. secretary of labor, William B. Wilson, initiated a special conciliation committee administered by Mayor John Hylan.90 Although Irish longshoremen initially participated in the commission, they eventually fled because Paul Vaccarelli, a former ILA vice president who had formed a rival union called the Riverfront and Marine Workers Union was on the commission. Black locals also served in positions of power. Daniel C. Petersen of all-black Local 873, served on the strike committee and as secretary of the grievance

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committee of the radical faction.91 Petersen and Walter Carr, of mixed Local 968, and eight other men drafted a proposal for standard working conditions and wages for the conciliation committee. The proposal sought to democratize the port. The Brooklyn locals’ delegates demanded that “their conditions be exactly the same in New York. . . . Also that every man working on a ship, whether same be Coastwise or Deep Sea ship, be considered longshore workers. It will be further understood that no man will return to work until every Local, no matter what the craft is, is satisfied.”92 The Chelsea locals withdrew from the Hylan conciliation committee, but remained on strike. They did not, however, support the grievance committees’ proposal for equal conditions.93 Understanding where the weight of the power of the ILA remained, the U.S. Shipping Board and War Department used Italian and black strikebreakers on the Chelsea piers.94 The strike failed—the Chelsea men returned to work and the Italian-black faction disassembled. According to Peter Hussy, secretary of the International Longshoremen’s Association, Local 895, the longshoremen lost the 1919 strike because “Negro strike breakers were imported from the South.”95 Although unionists and strikebreakers included blacks and Italians, the image of the strikebreaker remained inscribed on black workers. Black laborers outside of organized labor also fought for improved working conditions. Between 1919 and 1920, the building employees of the Russell Sage Foundation negotiated for higher wages and shorter hours. Like many workers during the postwar recession, black workers struggled to make ends meet, leading many to search for supplemental employment. In July of 1920, black women cleaners protested when a superintendent increased their work schedule by 30 minutes, which prevented them from reaching their other jobs on time. The women argued that the basis for their wages was a four-hour workday.96 The superintendent immediately changed the work schedule from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. Black women, especially, fought for control of their time in order to care for their children.97 At the Russell Sage Foundation, outside work became such a problem for the management that they were only willing to negotiate wage increases with the building workers if they committed to working full time solely for the foundation. The workers argued that they needed “a minimum on which they could live,” for at the time, their wages ranged between twenty-two and twenty-five dollars per week.98 The foundation claimed that outside work was a “disadvantage to the work in this building,” and responsible for tardiness.99 It was not against occasional outside work, but only steady outside jobs.100 The foundation, therefore, promised the workers a wage increase on the condition that they not work elsewhere, stating that “the building cannot be efficiently run if the employees give time and energy to other jobs.”101 With

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the increases, the weekly wages ranged between twenty-nine and thirty-two dollars. Nonetheless, a porter named E. Bowen objected to the requirement that he work exclusively for the foundation, arguing that he wanted extra money.102 Moreover, even with the bonuses, the workers continued to request additional wages, lamenting that the “rising costs are making it impossible for them to support themselves without additional earnings.” After insistence and further correspondences, the foundation finally agreed that the cost of living needed to be investigated.103 While work hours and wages remained paramount to all workers, black workers also organized to eradicate racism from the workplace. In October 1926, black waitresses and cooks working at the Alice Foote McDougall Coffee Shop, at 6 West 47th Street, protested the firing of a black waitress, Miss Petis.104 The head waitress had commanded Miss Petis not to give a black man “the same service she gave the others, as the company did not want to encourage colored people using the Coffee Shop.” She disregarded the order and served the black patron, anyway. Once the guests exited the restaurant, she was fired. At the end of the work day, the employees were informed, and subsequently the black employees boycotted the coffee shop, refusing to work until Petis was allowed to return to the job. They walked out on Friday afternoon and returned Saturday, once the management guaranteed “that there would be no more discrimination against patrons because of their color.”105 Notwithstanding sporadic successes in working-class resistance efforts, blacks invariably struggled to make ends meet. While the majority of black workers, like their white counterparts, remained excluded from trade unions, some did join, and among those who found a home within the labor movement, many prospered. Others lost faith in the labor movement, almost as quickly as they joined. *

*

*

Occasionally trade unions invited black workers to join their ranks.106 Trade union power partly depended upon its ability to control the labor market in its industry. By opening up their ranks to blacks, locals expanded their jurisdiction as well as their influence over the labor market. Membership to trade unions, therefore, meant higher wages and better hours. Trade unions with a representative membership of black workers included the International Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers Union (IHCBCLU), the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (BSCP), the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the New York Federation of Musicians (NYFM), and the National Federation of Post Office Clerks (NFPOC). While most black unionists

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belonged to interracial locals, some formed black locals of international and national unions, such as the International Union of Pavers, Rammermen, Flag Layers, Bridge and Curb Stone Setters and Sheet Asphalt Pavers, Local 92—Asphalt Block Layer; the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Local 1888—Carpenters; and the ILA, Local 968 in Brooklyn, New York.107 Other black unionists joined federated locals (locals chartered with the AFL but not affiliated with an international union), such as the BSCP, Local 18068, and independent black unions, such as the Brotherhood of Dining Car Employees. For black workers, membership in a union was often a mixed blessing. On the positive side, as one black bricklayer stated, “It made conditions, wages, hours, etc., better for all—no doubt about that.”108 In late October 1916, more than six thousand Italian hod carriers staged a strike against the Mayho Construction Company and the Peerless Products Company. During the strike, as non-union black workers crossed the picket lines, black unionists remained loyal to the IHCBCLU.109 Black workers also found equal treatment in some unions. On September 26, 1929, when black Communists charged into an ILGWU meeting at St. Luke’s Hall, black garment workers defended the ILGWU against the Communists’ allegations that the union treated blacks unequally: “One by one the girls who attended the meeting . . . rose and from their own experience told of the absolute equality of membership in our union.”110 According to Ira De Reid, black members of the National Federation of Federal Employees Union, Local No.4, were “active and responsive in meetings and show a fine spirit.”111 Some union officials believed that blacks were better unionists than whites.112 A representative of Local 749 of the Hod Carriers and Common Laborers Union claimed that black workers were “more conscientious than whites, because the kind of work is their Alpha and Omega.”113 Although some blacks fared well in the trade unions, others, even when members of trade unions, endured a different form of exclusion. As a black plasterer from South Carolina explained, although “it [the union] does get better working hours and better pay—it’s not such a big help to me because I don’t get a fair chance to work on these good jobs.” Trade unions willingly invited blacks for self-preservation rather than racial equality. Historian Eric Arnesen notes, “some whites concluded that it was safer to have blacks inside the labor movement—where they could be watched and controlled or where both groups could cooperate rather than clash—than outside of it.”114 According to John McPailtan of Local 63 of the Compressed Air and Foundation Workers Union, the local organized blacks because “in every case of strikes, blacks were used as scabs.”115 Mr. Sampson, delegate of the ILA’s Local 791, claimed that the union did not make special efforts to organize black workers

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and suggested that the union accepted blacks primarily to protect white workers.116 He asserted that though “the men will not accept the Negro as their social equal, they must accept him as their industrial equal.”117 While black workers joined unions because they promised overall improvement in conditions and wages, many became frustrated and alienated by the unions’ racist policies, especially the unequal distribution of job placements. In this sense, faced with the pressure to remain loyal to the union despite racial discrimination, many black workers without the weapon of the strike found themselves disarmed by remaining in the labor movement. Bob Mathews, formerly a president of a local of the Cigar Makers International Union, quit the union because the AFL did not condemn the racist policies of trade unions belonging to the federation.118 Similarly, an ex-member of a teachers’ union charged that the union was “never willing to make a cause for the Negro a major concern.”119 In 1926, the District Council of New York Unions denied a black union, Local 1888 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, the right to acquire its own business agent because other locals had jurisdiction over the territory to which Local 1888 belonged. The business agent found work for union members, and without the business agent, the local’s officer lamented, “men from other locals got jobs on projects up here in Harlem while we walked around without work. . . . Not one Negro carpenter worked on the Bronx Terminal Market on 149th Street and very, very few on the Y.M.C.A. on 135th Street or on the Harlem Hospital.”120 Joining unions undoubtedly improved black workers’ standard of living, but it also highlighted blacks’ marginal position in the job market as they confronted racism inside and outside the labor movement.

Black Labor Activism during the New Negro Era During and after the war, New Negro and reform organizations gauged the relationship between the black community and the labor movement. In the midst of the recession and the near economic inertia in the postwar era, black radical rhetoric and harsh criticisms of the AFL simmered, as black labor activists began reevaluating the viability of Harlemites joining the labor movement. So although the World War I era signaled a political and economic shift, symbolized by the radicalism of black Socialists and Communists, Harlem’s black leadership agreed that the economic well-being of the black district demanded that black workers align themselves with the labor movement. The radical politics of Hubert Harrison, the street orator and journalist, exemplifies black leaders’ critical engagement with the labor movement in

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Harlem during the early twentieth century. Born in St. Croix, in the Danish West Indies, on April 27, 1883, Harrison arrived in New York City in 1900 and moved to Harlem in 1907. He worked various odd jobs and, at different times, pursued several journalist ventures. Harlemites revered him as a public intellectual, an educator and, more importantly, an agitator for community rights. Joining the Socialist Party in 1911, Harrison wrote for its New York Call and the International Socialist Review as well as stumping for the Socialist ticket in Harlem. But the Socialist Party’s support of segregating blacks in the South, as well as the American Federation of Labor’s exclusionary policies, caused him to leave the party and to exhort blacks to follow a “race-first” perspective as a self-defense strategy promoting racial group consciousness in 1915. Although Harrison did not give up on socialism, he did question white Socialists’ and the labor movement’s commitment to the black working-class. By 1916, he gave up lecturing to white people in order to devote himself exclusively to organizing his own people, since the labor movement, with few exceptions, supported whites first. In the August 1917 issue of Harrison’s newspaper, the Voice, he wrote that there were two kinds of labor unions, the AFL and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The AFL’s “policy . . . toward the Negro has been damnable,” he averred. But he supported the IWW, because it organized all workers, regardless of race.121 As many historians have noted, Harrison’s searing analysis of class and race furnished a younger crop of activists with a welter of ideas to build upon. Marcus Garvey took up and reworked Harrison’s race-first perspective, and while his success derived partly from his own oratory, it was also due to the dispersal of his ideas under Harrison’s editorship of the Negro World in the early 1920s.122 A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, on the other hand, represent Harrison’s earlier Socialist stance. As Randolph asserted, “the progress of black labor could not be achieved without the association with white labor, and fundamentally the problem of black labor and white labor is the same.”123 Randolph and Owen, founders of the Messenger magazine, like Harrison beforehand, established ties with socialist trade unions. The New York Joint Board of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the ILGWU, the New York Joint Cloak Makers, the Workingmen’s Circle, the Jewish Daily Forward, New York District Painters’ Union, and the Marine Transport Workers all at some period financed the Messenger.124 In 1917, Randolph and Owen organized a local of the Elevator and Switchboard Operators Union. Initially, black elevator and switchboard operators resisted Randolph’s calls for interracial working-class unity. According to Randolph, they refused to be part of “a group of race haters, black haters who are opposed to anything that meant advancement for black people.”125

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Randolph understood their apprehension and suspicion, but urged them to consider their status as workers and the economic power workers could have as a collective force. As Randolph explained, “there is no hope for any group of workers without some power, and history had shown that the labor movement is the source of power for workers.”126 Once Randolph and Owen convinced enough building workers to join the union, they obtained a charter. Within three weeks, six hundred operators joined the union.127 They spoke at churches and on street corners, soliciting membership and explaining the problems they confronted as workers. Eventually, the International Union of Elevator Constructors took over the union, since the switchboard and elevator operators were within its jurisdiction. The black operators were disappointed. They had little faith in white-led unions that too often refused to fight racism within the labor movement. Believing that theirs was “both an economic and a racial fight,” they had hoped to promote their own union to advance black workers’ concerns. 128 Much like Harlem’s New Negroes, black reformers also pursued the support of the labor movement. In 1913, George Haynes of the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (NLUCAN) met with Hugh Frayne, general organizer of the AFL, to organize black workers. Although the AFL agreed to “cooperate with the National League,” national and international trade unions’ jurisdictional control over the locals prevented the AFL from forcing locals to open up their ranks to blacks workers.129 Several years later, in the midst of the Great Migration and the Great War, black organizations and the AFL deliberated on the future of black workers in the labor movement. During the conventions of 1916, 1917, and 1918, the AFL decided that black workers should be organized, but it made no efforts to initiate the process. In 1918, the NLUCAN held its annual convention in New York City. A committee of black organizations conferred with the executive council of the AFL, and in June 1918, a committee of black and white reformers, including the editor of the New York Age, Fred. R. Moore, and Eugene Kinckle Jones of the NLUCAN, submitted a resolution to the AFL’s 1918 convention. The committee, various black organizations, and local and federal labor unions courted the AFL, but as in 1913, craft sovereignty prohibited the AFL from requiring nationals and internationals to comply with its stated commitment to black workers.130 As they courted the AFL, black reform organizations began investigating the economic status of the black working class in the city. In 1919, the NLUCAN collaborated with the Consumers’ League, Young Women’s Christian Association, the Women’s Trade Union League, the Committee of Colored Workers of the Manhattan Trade School, and the Russell Sage Foundation to

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produce a study of black women in the industrial labor force, entitled A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker: A Study of Colored Women in Industry in 1919. In 1925, the Labor Bureau investigated the status of black workers for the New York Urban League. The report, Preliminary Survey of Industrial Distribution and Union Status of Negroes in New York City, concluded that blacks needed the protection of a labor union, trained black organizers, and a central body representing black unions and workers.131 The survey recommended that the NYUL and black unionists establish an organization on behalf of the black working class.

Frank Crosswaith and the Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers By the mid-twenties, black activists across the political spectrum individually and jointly courted the AFL. In the postwar era, more migrants settled in Harlem, but unlike their counterparts in Chicago and Detroit, Harlem’s black elite could not depend upon industrialists.132 Excluded from the industrial labor force, black workers depended upon strikebreaking to gain entry into many industries. Strikebreaking, however, was not the answer, since it hurt black trade unionists and corroborated the shibboleth that all blacks were a “scab race.” Furthermore, scabbing inadequately addressed the larger problem of black exclusion from trade unions. In spite of trade union racism, many black leaders reasoned that joining the labor movement would improve the economic well-being of the black community. As T. Arnold Hill, the National Urban League’s industrial secretary, exclaimed in 1925, “the only wise policy for negro workers to pursue, is to affiliate with those trades that are organized if they expect to work at them.”133 In this context, Frank Crosswaith and the Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers (TUCONW) tried to close the gap between black workers and the labor movement. While Crosswaith’s and the TUCONW’s efforts could not overcome racism within the labor movement, they did, however, establish greater unity among the so-called Old Negroes and New Negroes. Inspired in part by the creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids Union, liberal and radical black labor activists agreed to join forces for the good of black workers in the city and across the nation. In 1924, a group of black and white trade unionists met at the Civic Club, one of the few social clubs in the city that welcomed white and black members “for an exchange of ideas on the question of the Negro worker and his relations to organized labor.”134 Then on May 23, 1925, black and white trade unionists held a conference at Arlington Hall to determine the future of black

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workers in the labor movement. Attendees included the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Locals 2, 9, 89, and 91; the Amalgamated Tobacco Workers; the Button Workers, Local 132; the International Jewelry Workers, Local 17; the Waterproof Garment Workers, Local 20; the Paper Handlers & Sheet Straighteners, Local 1; the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 643; the Lithographers, Local 1; the Butchers, Local 660; the Elevator Operators & Starters, Local 67; the Bookkeepers, Stenographers, & Accountants; the Laundry Workers, Local 280; the Novelty Workers, Local 41; and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners, Locals 385 and 246.135 The delegates formed the Trade Union Committee for the Organizing Negro Workers (TUCONW). The conferees nominated Thomas Curtis, international president of the Tunnel & Subway Constructors’ Union and manager of the Building Trades Compensation Bureau, as chairman and treasurer; a black woman, Gertrude E. McDougald, of the Teacher’s Union, Local 5 and principal of Public School 89, as vice cairwoman; Frank Crosswaith, former organizer of the Elevator Operators & Starters, Local 67, as executive secretary; and A. August of the Cigarmakers’ Union as assistant secretary.136 Although the stated purpose of the conference was to “organize and cooperate with colored workers in the organization and educate white workers and colored workers,” another, and perhaps the most essential concern, for many of the delegates, was that “NEVER AGAIN MUST ORGANIZED LABOR LOSE ANOTHER STRIKE IN NEW YORK CITY THROUGH THE ACTIVITIES OF NEGRO STRIKE–BREAKERS.”137 The stereotype of the black scab loomed large for many conferees. Hugh Frayne, New York representative of the AFL, encouraged blacks to join the labor movement and the AFL, rather than organize separately. Discrimination needed to be “abandoned and cooperation substituted,” he demanded. Frayne then argued that blacks’ economic plight was the result of “the Negroes[’] economic status and environment,” meaning that their problems stemmed both from their position as unskilled workers and from racist hiring practices. While condemning employer racism, he stated that the labor movement’s discrimination was reactionary: “discrimination against colored workers is to be blamed upon themselves, for standing aloof from the labor movement.”138 Indeed, some black workers distrusted and others were unfamiliar with trade unionism. Frayne, however, absolved the labor movement of its formal and informal policies of exclusion, as well as the pattern of organizing black workers when it favored white unionists. Yet Frayne’s position may have resonated with many of the participating trade unions. Frank Crosswaith, however, assessed the relationship between blacks and the labor movement differently. Born in Fredericksted, St. Croix, in the Virgin

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Islands on July 16, 1892, Crosswaith immigrated to the United States in 1907 and arrived in New York City in 1910. Crosswaith served in the U.S. Navy and completed his undergraduate studies at the Rand School in the city. Before his work with the TUCONW, Crosswaith wrote articles for the Messenger and ran for public office as a candidate for the Socialist Party. Crosswaith blamed neither black workers nor the labor movement for the racial conflict between black and white workers. Rather, he believed that once black and white workers understood their common struggle against capital, the chasm between the races would subside. Despite the lackluster commitment of the AFL, the formation of the TUCONW signaled a shift in labor organizing in Harlem and New York City more generally. While ideological differences remained among black unionists, the NYUL, and other black labor associations, their joint endeavors initiated the starting point for cross-organizational black solidarity.139 On June 1, 1925, Crosswaith began the work of the TUCONW to unite black and white workers under one umbrella. The committee temporarily established headquarters at the office of the Messenger, free of charge, and on July 15, they found a permanent headquarters at 2380 Seventh Avenue. The committee endeavored to operate as a tool of propaganda fostering greater interracial class unity, and more significantly tried to create the conditions for locals to recruit blacks and to subsidize the labor activity of the committee. Soliciting monies from labor bodies and trade unions to defray operation costs, the TUCONW successfully secured donations from the American Fund for Public Service (AFPS) and thereafter circulated the plans of the committee to the trade unions that had attended the May 23 meeting and gave presentations to unions throughout the city about the necessity of unionizing black workers. The TUCONW lasted only a year. A confluence of events and obstacles hastened its demise. Before that, the committee was able to direct some black workers to unions in their trades—thus, to the International Ladies Garment Workers, Local 9 (1 worker); the Teamsters and Truck Drivers, Local 807 (1); the Bricklayers (3); the Furriers (1); the Italian Dress and Waist Makers, Local 89, (1); the Bookkeepers, Stenographers, & Accountants (2); Cloth, Hat & Cap (1); the Common Laborers, Local 73 (1); the Painters, Local 261 (4); the Iron Workers (1); the Garage Workers (1); and the Machinists (1). But apart from these instances, Crosswaith unavoidably ran up against trade union racism. Despite the trade unions declarations of commitment to black workers at the May meeting, many locals stubbornly adhered to their customary exclusionary tactics.

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While Crosswaith repeatedly recounted how trade unions “courteously” listened to his appeals on behalf of black workers, the result was usually the same—rejection. In early June 1925, despite Crosswaith’s “interesting and friendly conference with the officers” of the Machinist union regarding Dan Welch, a black machinist, they “regretted their inability to accept the Negro Machinist . . . in the Union.” In his June 19 letter to the AFPS, he soberly admitted that “the task we face is by no means an easy one,” for “some of the Unions in this city, as you no doubt know, have constitutional clauses which bar out the Negro worker.” But he also claimed that constitutional clauses were not the only barriers to admitting black workers, for those without such clauses “succeed[ed] just as effectively.” Crosswaith argued that the labor movement was at a critical moment. The massive black migration from the South had transformed the labor situation in the North. The black worker, he explained, was now a factor “to be reckoned with and unless we reach him now and line him up on labor’s side in the struggle for industrial democracy, those who stand for autocracy and chaos in the industry will use him to their own advantage.”140 Aside from rejecting black workers, trade unions contributed no funds to the committee’s effort. The committee relied on the auspices of the AFPS throughout its nine months existence. According to Crosswaith, unions likely to contribute financial assistance endured internal strife and could offer little help. He also believed the committee needed more effective programming. “It is plain,” rationalized Crosswaith, “that we will have to do more organizational and educational work.” He surmised that if the committee “educate[s] both the white and black worker to the realization that labor is the common denominator of us all, and that all workers have a common economic interest,” their economic woes would surely end.141 Once this point was recognized, he expected that contributions from allied trade union to the TUCONW would be forthcoming. By the end of the summer, as the committee tirelessly pursued its campaign to persuade trade unions to accept black workers, the formation of an all-black union inspired Crosswaith to reconsider his relationship with the labor movement. On August 25, 1925, a group of Pullman porters formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maid Union (BSCP), electing A. Philip Randolph, the fiery black socialist and editor of the Messenger, as president. When Randolph traveled the Midwest and West Coast organizing for the Sleeping Car Porters, Crosswaith, while still active in the TUCONW, stumped as the BSCP’s main organizer in New York City. In his report to the executive committee of the TUCONW, Crosswaith imparted that he had

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“been the principal speaker at every one of their [BSCP’s] meetings since their organizer went away.” He added, “I have also had to turn over our Stenographer to them quite often, and I have written all the news releases for them.” Crosswaith’s initial enthusiasm for the TUCONW had been redirected to the BSCP, whose potential, he believed, could be transformative for black workers not only in New York but nationwide.142 Meanwhile, the fate of the TUCONW remained tethered to the Fund. In the wake of the founding of the BSCP, as well as the committee’s dire financial circumstances, Crosswaith conveyed his frustration with the labor movement, while remaining committed to interracial class unity. In a letter to the AFPS, dated early January 1926, Crosswaith explained that “before many unions will commit themselves to financial support, they must be educated in the fundamentals of the situation.” Though still displaying hope in the labor movement, Crosswaith criticized the exclusionary and dubious practices of the city’s locals. He warned that “the white trade unions must be taught to understand that the old practice of taking notice of the Negro workers only during the period of a strike, will not remedy the situation but will continue to breed race-riots, bitterness and hostility, between groups whose economic interest is identical.”143 Still, as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the secretary of the AFPS, advised, the fund could not continue to be the committee’s main benefactor. She wrote, “you have undoubtedly done splendid work which is greatly appreciated . . . but . . . we are very adverse to undertaking to subsidize for a long period of times enterprises which most certainly should have the unquailed endorsement and general financial support of the labor movement and we consider that your committee comes within that category.” The committee, it seemed, was on its last legs, for organized labor had once again neglected to do its part.144 On Christmas Eve, Crosswaith received a letter from Hugh Frayne inviting him to attend a conference to be held on January 12, 1926, for the purpose of “work[ing] out a program whereby, there may be more united action and better cooperation in the movement for organizing the colored workers.” At last Crosswaith believed, the efforts of the TUCONW had begun to bear fruit. In response to Flynn’s recent letter, Crosswaith optimistically announced that the labor movement now understood that it had to take black workers seriously. “That this lesson is being learnt is evident from the fact that, President Green [of the AFL] has directed Mr. Frayne to call a conference of Negro labor organization,” he said. At the meeting, which was attended by Randolph, Reinzi B. Lemus of the Brotherhood of Dining Car Employees, Henry Haummel, president of the Professional Club, and T. Arnold Hill, director of the Department of Industrial Relations of the National Urban League, among

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others, Frayne “spoke at length telling us in substance that: President Green had decided to give some time and attention to the matter of organizing the unorganized Negro workers.”145 This meeting seemed to signal a departure from the AFL’s customary negligence and repeated claims of powerlessness regarding racism among its international and national unions. Since September 1925, President Green had claimed that the federation was committed to organizing black workers. The organization of the TUCONW, the BSCP, and especially the Communist Party’s American Negro Labor Congress had rekindled Green’s interest in black workers, particularly in New York City. As Green plainly stated, “warnings have been issued to organized labor and to negroes specifically not to allow themselves to be lured from principles and practices that make for substantial progress.” In this way, the AFL’s invitation represented not only a sign of its newfound interest in the black workers, but also a clarion call for black labor activists to stay away from the Communists Party.146 On January 22, and once again on the 28th, leaders of civil rights and black-led labor organizations, including Crosswaith, Randolph, Haummel, Lemus, and Gertrude E. McDougald, presented Frayne with a plan requesting official endorsement and recognition from the AFL, the appointment of “a capable Negro trade unionist to sit on the Executive Council of the A.F. L.,” and the establishment of “Committees similar to the T.U.C for O.N. W. in other industrial centers where Negro workers are located.”147 In their letter to Frayne, which included the signature of James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP, the all-black committee of labor and civil rights organizations explained that they were “mindful of the resolutions” of the AFL, but the pervasive discrimination employed by the national unions had virtually nullified “the good intentions which these resolutions avow.” The groundswell of black unity underlined the role of Harlem as the epicenter of black protest and black radicalism, as well as New York City as the headquarters of the major civil rights organizations and the trailblazing efforts of Crosswaith and the TUCONW. The joint efforts of these organizations in the city and especially the objective of establishing a black executive “who will have the privilege of sitting with the council to handle the labor problems of the American Federation of Labor incident to Negro wage-earners” represented an ambitious attempt both to ensure the accountability of the AFL to black workers and to forge a national black labor movement.148 Confident, Crosswaith asked Flynn to reconsider his previous appeal for financial support, despite the mixed messages of the AFL.149 A week or so later, Flynn promised to allocate three hundred dollars quarterly towards their expenses and to match dollar for dollar contributions from trade unions

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up to six hundred dollars per quarter. She reminded him that the AFPS expected trade unions to carry the financial burden of the TUCONW, saying “we insist upon the matching arrangement because we feel that your committee is entitled to much more generous support from the trade unions than you have receive to date.” By early May, Crosswaith admitted to Flynn that the committee’s work had “slowed down” to reduce their expenses until the AFL “decided upon its fate.” The AFL ignored the request for a black executive, although it claimed, as the black weeklies reported, to “give the matter serious consideration.”150 A month later, Crosswaith wrote to Morris L. Ernst, treasurer of the fund, that the committee no longer tried to acquire financial support from unions. The work of the committee would be fully devoted to organizing Pullman porters. “With the success of the Porters’ efforts,” Crosswaith asserted, “the usefulness of and need for the Trade Union Committee shall have been more than convincingly demonstrated to those who still prefer to leave the Negro worker helpless on the industrial field to be literally torn asunder between the conflicting interest of organized capital and organized labor.”151 In the BSCP, Crosswaith saw the power of selfdetermination and racial solidarity in action. The AFL had once again failed to uphold its claims to antidiscrimination resolutions and commitment to all workers regardless of race. Thereafter, Crosswaith and other black labor leaders such as A. Philip Randolph thought more carefully about their reliance on organized labor to jump-start their campaigns. Black leaders, while forging affiliations with like-minded white-led organizations, began encouraging cross-organizational and ideological coordination among all-black or predominately black organizations and institutions. In this way, they hoped to harness the black neighborhood as a political bloc, and thenceforth as a basis for mass political and social change.152

“The Weapon of the Boycott Must Be Used” In the spring of 1925, Harlemites initiated two interrelated labor campaigns. First, the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News threatened along with others to boycott Harlem theaters that dared not hire black motion-picture operators. Simultaneously, the New York Amsterdam News and Crosswaith tried to persuade the Motion Picture Machine Operators of America, Local 306, which contracted with some theaters in Harlem, to accept black operators in the trade union. Second, this effort, in turn, engendered a strike sponsored by newly minted black members of Local 306 against the Lafayette Theater. While black labor activists and their allies advocated for the projectionists to secure better wages and working conditions, they

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also framed the workers’ strike around Harlemites’ community rights. All of the projectionists’ supporters agreed that Harlem workers should receive jobs not only because they were qualified but also because all businesses should be loyal to the majority of their patrons. While Harlem’s first labor strike failed to rouse the community into action, it inspired street orators and intellectuals, such as the revered Hubert Harrison, to get involved. The black projectionists’ strike underscored Harlemites’ disillusionment with the white-led labor movement and their growing commitment to black labor activism. At the same time, Harlem’s diverse public sphere employed a range of tactics to transform the conditions of black workers in Harlem in order to bring about a realization of their community rights.153 *

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One week after the formation of the TUCONW, a delegation of black operators, known as the United Association of Colored Motion Picture Operators (UACMPO), requested the committee’s aid in their efforts to join Local 306, efforts that had been ongoing for years and for years had been rejected.154 In times of need—protection from strikebreakers—Local 306 had organized blacks and given them “permit cards,” but once the “strike cloud had rolled away, their permit cards were taken from them,” explained Crosswaith.155 On June 16, 1925, Crosswaith spoke to the Local 306’s executive committee, but received no support. “It is plain that the officials, while very courteous, do not desire to have Negroes in the Union,” declared Crosswaith.156 In April 1926, almost a year later, Local 306 agreed to accept black workers as an auxiliary, but only under unequal conditions. The local “confined [the black operators] as far as physically possible to working in the colored belt under the jurisdiction of the Local No. 306,” and prohibited them from attending its regular meetings. The local’s president would nominate a representative from the auxiliary, who would represent them in all matters of business.157 As paying members of the union, black operators would have neither a voice in the local’s operations nor employment opportunities outside of Harlem. With their pride intact, the black operators rejected the terms. As the New York Amsterdam News noted, the slow desegregation of employment in the motion picture operators’ profession in Harlem theaters made it unwise for them “to pay dues to be Jim Crowed.”158 Local 306’s criteria locked black operators out of job opportunities in other areas of the city, and limited them to jobs in Harlem where only a few theaters hired black operators. While Crosswaith and the TUCONW corresponded with Local 306, the New York Age, the Amsterdam News, the Association of Trade and Commerce, and various organizations throughout Harlem organized to get black

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motion picture operators hired in Harlem theaters. In late June 1925, a committee of “representative Negroes” met with the management of the Roosevelt and Douglas theaters to hire black operators. The manager of the Roosevelt claimed that “as soon as practicable colored operators will be given a chance to work” at the Roosevelt, Douglas, and Odeon theaters. The committee tried to convince the theaters that they should employ black operators since blacks comprised the majority of the theaters’ patrons. As the New York Amsterdam News explained, Harlemites “are almost the sole support of these places showing pictures to thousands each week.”159 By March of 1926, nothing had been done. In fact, the theater owners were hostile. “The very idea of colored people wanting colored operators in a strictly colored neighborhood is said to strike them as ridiculous and presumptuous,” explained the Age.160 To publicize the jobs campaign, the New York Amsterdam News spotlighted the theaters in Harlem that hired black operators, such as the Lafayette, the Renaissance, and the Gem. In the spring 1926, black operators also placed advertisements in the theater section of the black weekly: NOTICE TO THE PUBLIC The following theatres in Harlem catering to colored people employ all colored motion picture operators: LAFAYETTE THEATRE 7th Ave. & 132nd St. RENAISSANCE THEATRE 7th Ave. & 138th St. GEM THEATRE 135th St. 5th and Lenox Ave. MEMBERS OF THE COLORED MOTION PICTURE PROJECTIONIST ASSOCIATION 161

Through the use of such propaganda, the operators and the Amsterdam News hoped not only to pressure other theater owners to employ black operators but also to encourage Harlemites to consider the theaters’ loyalty to the black community. Black leaders waged a two-front battle, one for jobs and one for unionization of black projectionists. The black weeklies contended that it was their community right to obtain work in their own neighborhood. They fought against Jim Crow standards in theaters in Harlem and for membership to the motion picture operators’ union. Black motion picture operators had no allies. “These Theater Owners cannot employ Negro Operators because they are not Union men and the Union will not accept them because they are

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Negroes,” lamented Crosswaith.162 Black journalists, as well as other black leaders, expected all businesses in Harlem not only to respect black patrons but also to employ black residents. They argued that community businesses had a responsibility to their black patrons. As the New York Age stated plainly, “there is nothing revolutionary nor unusual in the modest request of Harlem colored theatergoers that colored operators be given work in houses where the race makes it possible for the doors to be kept open.”163 Since theaters in white neighborhoods hired few blacks operators, the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News believed it only natural and just that black operators obtain jobs in Harlem theaters. White operators, by contrast, “enjoy a wide field: the whole world is open to them.”164 And while there were a few blacks who worked in white neighborhoods, they earned wages “no white operator will accept, wages below that of even the unskilled labor employed in theatres right here in Harlem.”165 The two major black weeklies held expectations of Harlemites, too. They urged the black community to support the black operators’ cause. While the New York Amsterdam News encouraged Harlemites to get “together and prove to the owners of theaters in this community that we look with much disfavor on this attitude where colored operators are concerned,” the New York Age similarly stated that “the public is entitled to know the facts in this case. Maybe if it does the management will learn to know the race better.”166 The New York Amsterdam News even questioned blacks’ commitment to their race, claiming “if enough colored people were blessed with ‘race-consciousness’ . . . of the real kind this condition would not exist.”167 Like Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey, the black weeklies encouraged blacks to think race first and to employ their collective consumer power by means of the boycott. By May, the tide had changed. In late March, the New York Amsterdam News reported that the managers of the Lincoln, Franklin, Roosevelt, and Douglas theaters had begun to “recogniz[e] the fairness of their claims”168 Exiting manager Pekelner of the Roosevelt and Douglas theaters assured the weekly that new management would finally hire black operators in early May. The news was bittersweet, however. Within a week, the paper reported that there were jobs in the two theaters open to black operators, but only if they joined the union. The New York Amsterdam News wondered why the union wanted to “function in a district with people who are so hateful to them they are forced to make certain rules for whites and different rules for the colored operators.” Anticipating the unions’ previous policy of limiting blacks to jobs in Harlem theaters, the Amsterdam News charged, “the weapon of the boycott must be used among Negroes when their own are offended.” The weekly prepared to galvanize the whole of the black community, not only politicizing

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black consumers but also proposing to deploy the services of Harlem’s street orators. As the paper warned, “the law which gives these boys the right to make an open appeal to the public for support can be invoked by sending speakers on the corners of Harlem to tell Negroes how they are being discriminated against.”169 In May 1926, after an exchange with Romeo Dougherty, the theater and sports editor of the Amsterdam News, Local 306 announced that it accepted any motion picture operators, regardless of color, creed, or race.170 Dougherty then reprinted the local’s letter stating that blacks would only be admitted into Local 306 as an auxiliary with limited privileges. Thereafter, Local 306 invited black operators into the union. Then in late June, the local tried to unionize the Lafayette and Renaissance theaters in Harlem.171 Dougherty remained neutral; as he stated, “Let Local 306 remember that both the Lafayette and Renaissance Theatres were employing colored motion picture operators without being prodded by the union.”172 Although the local was open to black operators, Dougherty was not convinced that the union would treat them fairly. By July, however, he had sided with the union. “With Local 306 on the job looking out for the interests of the colored operators the same as they have been doing for the white operators, it will mean the last step that will usher in a better day for the boys operating the machines in the local theatres.” He added, “today we personally hold no doubt in the matter and can assure these two houses that it is for the best interests if their operators to join the union.”173 The black labor activists had successfully accomplished both of their goals. Yet by siding with Local 306, the Amsterdam News had begun a new campaign against the Lafayette Theater, which had faithfully employed black operators from the start. On Labor Day, September 6, 1926, the black operators “without any notice or warning whatsoever . . . failed to show up for work,” explained the owner, Leo Brecher.174 Later that evening, the black projectionists picketed the Lafayette, demanding “the same scale of wages as the same owners of the theatre in question have been paying to white operators in another one of their houses.”175 The black operators argued that their requests were fair. They were “hard working moving picture operators” who sought to save a “little money” and perhaps enjoy “some of the comforts of life to which we all aspire at some time or other in our lives.”176 They marked the Lafayette as unjust and racist. Local 306 alleged that Brecher would “rather close the Lafayette Theatre than accede to the demands of the union in their demand for full and equal rights for the operators of color to work at the Lafayette.”177 As Local 306 expressed its support for the black operators throughout the month of September, Brecher and his management retaliated with evidence

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that called into question the local’s commitment to racial equality. According to Brecher and Frank Schiffman, manager of the Lafayette, the theaters controlled by “the union gives the jobs of chief operator to the white members, while colored operators are given the relief jobs, and not all the colored men are working.”178 Black operators, therefore, would not benefit from union membership in Local 306. Furthermore, Brecher reminded readers of the Lafayette’s fairness and loyalty to black operators, noting that “all colored men were non-union men because the union refused to accept colored operators as members.”179 On the evening of October 2, Frank Schiffman told an Amsterdam News writer that the Lafayette was prepared to comply with the terms set by Local 306. But the local’s terms had now changed. Unless Brecher signed all of his theaters under union contract, the black operators and Local 306 refused to negotiate. Thomas Johnson, a black operator at the Roosevelt Theater, explained that black and white operators protested as a “perfect unit” for “their rights.” After the local called out Lafayette operators to strike, white workers in Brecher’s other theaters—the Washington, the Olympic, and the Verona— boycotted them. Black musicians of the Lafayette Theater and white musicians of Brecher’s Plaza Theater also joined the boycott. President Sam Kaplan and Vice President Eichorn of Local 306 met with Brecher in his office in the Plaza Theater. Local 306 promised “every angle that can be lawfully brought to bear will be called into play.”180 While the black operators’ allegiance to the local demonstrated their commitment to their white brethren, as the Amsterdam News noted, it also induced the weekly to reevaluate Local 306’s initial motives.181 As the intentions of Local 306 surfaced, the Amsterdam News cautiously withdrew its support in early October. Once Schiffman promised the Amsterdam News that the Lafayette would “meet all of the demands of Local 306 in behalf of the Negro motion picture operators,” and Local 306 intensified its attack against the Lafayette and Brecher, the Amsterdam News had reached an impasse. Complicating the situation was evidence that Local 306 deceived the black community. The “fight between the union and the Brecher interests is even deeper than any one of us thought at the outset,” explained the Amsterdam News. The campaign for equality in wages and conditions for black operators was a gambit the union deployed to force Brecher to sign over his theaters. “It was told to us that in spite of the charges being made that the race issue is the biggest thing in the fight,” the Amsterdam News admitted. The black projectionists joined “their white co-workers in a fight against the Leo Brecher interests and not particularly the Lafayette Theatre.” The black weekly had supported the local because of its alleged newfound antiracism.

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Although the theater promised to submit to the black operators’ initial demands, the Amsterdam News continued to support the union, asserting that the Local 306’s ultimate goal was about equal opportunity along all lines.182 In response to the picketing, Brecher obtained two injunctions; the first prohibited operators from interrupting business, and the second prevented the Musicians’ Union, Local 802, from joining the boycott.183 Schiffman even extended the Lafayette’s offer to October 14.184 The Lafayette also signed non-union black motion picture operators to demonstrate its commitment to black operators. On October 13, Supreme Court Justice Edward Glennon issued an order retracting the injunction. Once the order was signed, Local 306 immediately sent its operators to picket the Lafayette, Belmore, Verona, Washington, and Olympic theaters.185 In the course of the battle in the courthouse and between Brecher and the local, the findings of respected street orators, Professor S. R. Williams and Hubert Harrison, confirmed Brecher’s claims of Local 306’s questionable intentions. Professor Williams interviewed Mr. Kaplan, president of Local 306, Mr. Feldman, organizer for the local, and Leo Brecher. Initially, Williams supported the union, but after the investigation he confirmed Brecher’s allegations—the union controlled theaters where blacks worked only as relief operators, or not at all. The union shrewdly admitted black operators into the local before union contracts expired in September 1926, according to Williams. As before, Local 306 tried to protect itself from the “strike cloud.”186 From the start, Hubert Harrison declared, “unlike Abraham Lincoln, my prime object was not to save the union but to ‘free the slaves.’”187 He had previously supported the union despite his distrust of the AFL. As a former member of the Socialist Party, he understood in principle the antagonistic relationship between capital and labor, but through his own experiences he learned that “the black worker was opposed by the general run of white working men.” News of Local 306’s initial stipulations, particularly with regard to the admission of black projectionists within a segregated auxiliary, only stirred up greater doubt of the local’s loyalties to the black operators. With this contradictory information, Harrison decided to investigate the situation himself. He learned that only one of Brecher’s theaters was unionized and that the white unionists did not join the strike. As Harrison observed, “it seemed to me that there was something fishy about their claim that they had the Negro workers’ interests primarily at heart. It appeared that they were sacrificing those interests by forcing the fight up here in order to secure victory somewhere else.” When Mr. Sims, one of the two striking operators fired from the Lafayette, informed him that the Lafayette had always maintained conditions and wages comparable to unionized theaters, and especially that Local

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306 was reluctant to negotiate with Brecher unless he “surrender all along the line,” Harrison promptly “passed out of the picture as a union sympathizer.”188 Like Williams, Harrison interviewed the Lafayette’s management. Schiffman told Harrison that none of the black operators were employed as chief motion picture operators in unionized theaters in Harlem, as the union and the black operators had claimed in the Amsterdam News. Schiffman suggested that Harrison “go see for [him]self.” Harrison went to the Odeon Theater, where the manager told Harrison that the operators were always white. He climbed upstairs and looked into the projection room and found a white operator. At the Roosevelt, he learned that a black operator worked only as a relief operator to the white chief operator. And finally, Harrison inquired about the Lincoln Theater’s workforce, where he found two black operators, again working as relief operators to the chief white operator.189 Although the union had clearly “misrepresented such fundamental facts,” Harrison continued to support the black operators. On the evening of September 27, he scheduled a conference, which included the union, Lafayette’s management and himself. When Harrison approached them in front of the theater, the union representatives ignored him. He exclaimed, “they hardly knew me! They finally declared that they didn’t even know that there was to be any conference at 2:00.” Harrison walked away, “thinking some awful thoughts.” As he continued down the block, he met Mr. Johnson, a black operator, who told him that after he left Monday night, union officials and Schiffman talked for nearly an hour and decided that Tuesday’s conference was unnecessary. Harrison never found out why the unionists pretended they “didn’t KNOW of their own agreement.” He concluded that it was not for him to advise the black operators. He warned, “I risk the prophecy that after they have served their ‘friends’ turn[,] these ‘friends’ will do to them as they did before this sudden burst of friendship.”190 Notwithstanding Williams’s and Harrison’s statements, the Amsterdam News reinforced its support of the union. In its June 8, 1927, edition, it reported that Brecher settled with Motion Pictures Operators Union, Local 306, and that the black operators returned to their jobs in the Lafayette on the union wage scale for 1927. While the black weekly initially claimed to be unaware of the local’s scheme, it now admitted to knowing the local’s objectives. The Amsterdam News believed the black operators’ future lay with the union. Local 306’s gambit potentially benefited all motion picture operators, since the control of the industry gave labor the upper hand. Yet, the local’s racial politics had been insincere regarding its support of black operators. As Williams’s and Harrison’s fact-finding mission showed, Local 306’s machinations, like the labor movement in the city in general, invited black projectionists to

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their local primarily to protect white workers. By the end of the strike, the Amsterdam News endorsed the union’s fabrication of interracialism, inquiring, “who in their position would not?”191 Local 306’s and the Amsterdam News’s realpolitik tactics garnered negligible support from Harlemites. As the paper admitted, “Negroes did not respond as it was thought they would when the news went through Harlem like wild fire that a real strike was taking place in our midst.” Harlemites reasonably distrusted unions, and remained suspicious of the union’s support for black operators, despite the Amsterdam News’s embrace of trade unionism. During the majority of the dual campaign, from the summer 1925 through May 1926, the black community—the black weeklies, the black operators association, black spokespeople, and other black workers—set out to desegregate the union and the workforce in Harlem theaters. The Lafayette theater hired black operators “without being prodded by the union,” as Dougherty reminded New York Amsterdam News readers back in June. The union’s newfound racial egalitarianism shied in comparison to the loyalty the Lafayette arguably enjoyed from its blacks patrons since 1913, especially since residential areas, restaurants, theaters, and other public places along 125th Street were only just beginning to admit blacks as tenants and patrons. More significantly, the Lafayette treated black patrons with respect, unlike nearby theaters, such as Loew’s Victoria Theater, which shepherded blacks to the balcony seats. Harlemites’ faith in the street speakers and their antagonistic experience with the House of Labor brought into question the local’s sporadic commitment to black people. As Harrison warned, “a record of facts stares them [black operators] unblinkingly in the face.”192 And once Harrison and Williams presented these facts to the Amsterdam News’s readers and to black passersby in the streets, Harlemites assuredly interpreted the rhetoric of the operators’ union as just another case of the AFL advancing the white workers’ interests first and those of the black working class last. Overall, Harlemites’ rejection of Local 306’s strike reflected their mistrust of the labor movement, their desire to control their leisure time, and their loyalty to the Lafayette, rather than disloyalty to the black operators.

Conclusion At the dawn of the Great Depression, Harlemites, black activists, and social and civil rights groups across the nation continued to question the sincerity and commitment of the labor movement to the black working class. The AFL, especially, was now under siege from multiple fronts. In January 1929, Walter White, of the NAACP, described a speech given by John Frey, a representative

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of the AFL, as the “nadir in casuistic defense of exclusion of Negroes from labor unions by a representative of the American Federation of Labor,” inciting a hue and cry from Frey.193 In the summer of the same year, William Green gave a speech to a crowd of more than 2,500 people at Reverend Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinia Baptist Church. The audience respectfully listened to Green’s speech, but three hecklers from the Communist Party highlighted Green’s questionable portrayal of the AFL’s commitment to black workers; and finally at the end of the year, Elmer Anderson Carter, editor of the Opportunity, highlighted the AFL’s failure not only to organize black workers but also the majority of white workers, once again precipitating an outcry—from William Green.194 Black leaders’ and black-led organizations’ criticisms had heralded a change in tactics and organization regarding the labor question. The groundswell of black labor activism in the 1920s signaled a shift from individual responses to collective efforts as represented by the labor organizing of the TUCONW, the black newspapers, and NYUL. This fledging black labor movement utilized the black public sphere both in print media and in the streets, and suggested a range of tactics to mobilize and educate the black community about their community rights as residents, patrons, and workers in Harlem. In the midst of the black projectionists’ strike, the league initiated the “Employment for Negro Workers Week” campaign, which lasted from November 28 to December 4, 1926. The league and a committee that included leaders from reform, labor, and neighborhood organizations, such as Fred R. Moore of the New York Age, William Kelley of the New York Amsterdam News, Mrs. Emma Shields of the 137th Street YWCA, Mrs. Eunice H. Carter of the Federation of Progressive Women, Frank Crosswaith, C. M. Hansom of the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks, Adam Clayton Powell, and many others, tried to convince white businesses to employ black workers. In one of the large stores on 125th Street, of several hundred employees, only one was black. At another establishment, where, according to the Age, 99 percent of patrons were black, the owner stated that he “was not at all in favor of colored employees.” The league concluded, “Harlem business enterprises are indifferent toward the employment of colored help, and will remain so until a demand is made by the people of the community for a change.”195 Although unsuccessful, Harlem’s black leadership now understood that economic change would come only through mass involvement and across organizational mobilization. The 1920s was the beginning of black labor activists’ and black institutions’ attempts to mobilize Harlemites and coordinate their activities as a politicized community to challenge discriminatory practices in the neighborhood and

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in labor unions. Although short-lived, the TUCONW and the projectionists’ strike raised Harlemites’ community and racial consciousness about the labor movement and established an infrastructure for a black unionism and a community-based working-class activism attuned to the benefits of coalition building across ideological lines. The “Employment for Negro Workers Week” campaign was only a one example. Through these collaborative actions of the district’s black institutions, labor activists, and intellectuals, Harlemites began organizing along racial lines, while cognizant of intraracial class friction and ideological differences. No issue better exemplifies these tensions than the campaign to combat rent gouging and to improve housing conditions in Harlem.

3

“Colored People Have Few Places to Which They Can Move” Tenants, Landlords, and Community Mobilization

In 1928 black communist Richard B. Moore asserted, “Negro workers are set upon at the point of consumption by rent hogs and landlord sharks who take advantage of their segregated situation.”1 As the leader of the Harlem Tenants League (HTL), Moore charged that white and black landlords exploited black tenants both as a class and a race. Moore, the HTL, and various neighborhood tenant organizations during the 1920s pinpointed landlords and realtors, black and white, as responsible for the housing crisis in Harlem. Less than two decades before, blacks had bestowed praise upon trailblazing black realtors as they opened up Harlem apartments. But residential segregation created the conditions for landlords to charge black tenants higher rent than white tenants. Moreover, black tenants soon learned that shared race did not preclude black realtors from exploiting the “segregated situation”; their doing so highlighted intraracial class conflict within the black community. This chapter examines the Harlem tenant movement for better housing conditions and lower rent. Harlemites interpreted the high rents as a form of racism predicated on residential segregation. The most organized of Harlem’s grassroots movement, this tenant movement best exemplifies Harlemites’ struggle for community rights. Tenant activists persistently argued that they had the community right to fair rents, responsible landlords, and racial loyalty. Harlemites pursued their community rights by mobilizing tenants, churches, and neighborhood institutions to collectively challenge exploitative landlords in the courts and at mass meetings, and real estate associations at the state capital in Albany, New York In 1916, a cadre of black women in Harlem waged a three-month campaign against exploitative landlords to lower rents and improve housing conditions, thereby establishing the institutional basis upon which black tenants resisted landlords in the postwar era. During the war, the building construction industry shifted its resources to war mobilization, thereby contributing to housing shortages and rent inflation. These conditions incited a citywide tenant campaign on the part tenant organizations, judges, and lawyers, who 93

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pressured the State of New York to pass the Emergency Rent Laws in 1920, which strengthened city tenement ordinances and equipped tenants to defend themselves in court. In the mid-1920s, as building construction returned to prewar levels, the tenant movement abated in other areas of the city, but rents remained conspicuously high in Harlem. As the Emergency Rent Laws neared expiration at the end of the 1920s, Harlem neighborhood associations, black weeklies, and the religious community aggressively campaigned for the extension of the laws. In the midst of the tenant campaign, black politicians and black weeklies jointly championed a “vote black” campaign to elect black candidates to public office. In 1928, Richard B. Moore and the communist Harlem Tenants League urged blacks to take to the streets and to engage in rent strikes and protest marches, eliciting further political debate and exposing Harlemites to alternative tactics for political change. Although the tenant campaigns failed to renew the Emergency Rent Laws, Harlem’s tenant movement and the vote black campaign converged to elect blacks to the nineteenth and twenty-first assembly districts to address issues that concerned the Harlem community. Through this politicization process, blacks not only became more empowered to vote in their own interests but also learned a range of tactics to bring about political change.

“The Colored People of New York City Suffer More Injustice in the Matter of Rental than Any Other Class of Citizens” Throughout the nineteenth century, African Americans’ search for better housing and living conditions precipitated incessant resettlement throughout the city.2 Early in the century, blacks resided between Canal Street to the north and Cedar Street to the south; between the 1820s and 1840s they lived in the Five Points district, and in the 1830s in Greenwich Village. By the 1860s, blacks settled on MacDougal, Bleeker, Carmine, Sullivan, Cornelia, and Thompson Streets, and Minetta Lane in the Upper Village.3 In the 1880s and 1890s, they lived in the West Twenties and Thirties; others moved further north to the Forties and Fifties as well as over to the East Side, to the Eighties, Nineties, and One Hundreds. Between 1900 and 1910, blacks moved to the San Juan Hill district, the Westside in the Upper Fifties and Sixties, and finally to Harlem. In each neighborhood, blacks encountered blatant racism and residential segregation. According to historian Seth Scheiner, “whether rich or poor, [blacks] were limited by prejudice in [their] choice of location.” White landlords even rejected blacks who were willing to pay higher rents. In 1869 a

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black tenant lamented the race’s difficulty in finding adequate housing, recalling “hundreds of us would gladly pay twice the rent to live in some more respectable neighborhoods.” He complained that “landlords will not accept us as tenants on any terms, declaring that should they rent a couple of rooms to a colored man, all their white lodgers would immediately give them notice to leave.”4 Consequently, landlords opened up their apartments to blacks only after whites used them. In 1903, William H. Baldwin, president of the Long Island Railroad, explained that landlords leased their houses solely to blacks after the landlord “gets as much use as possible out of his property from the Irish, when he can no longer rent his tenement house to the Italians.”5 The growing population, coupled with residential segregation, resulted in exorbitant rents and excessive congestion. As the black journal the New York Freeman states plainly, “the colored people of New York City suffer more injustice in the matter of rental than any other class of citizens.” According to historian Gilbert Osofsky, among twenty-five ethnic groups in the San Juan Hill area, blacks paid the highest rents.6 In 1889, for example, a landlord rented a house to whites for $127 a month; when the landlord leased the same building to blacks, the rental increased to $144 a month.7 In order to afford these rates, blacks took in lodgers. In 1897, a study performed by the Federation of Churches found that 40 percent of black families had lodgers.8 This, of course, contributed to severe congestion. These conditions, along with sporadic episodes of interracial violence, impelled blacks to move to Harlem. As black New Yorkers and migrants fled to Harlem for better housing, they constantly ran into the color line. In the pre–World War I period, as before, residential segregation created the circumstances for widespread housing congestion and exorbitant rents. The transition from a predominately white to a black neighborhood took two long decades. As chapter 1 spotlights, this shift had to do with both the commitment of blacks to obtain better housing and the fear among whites that they might lose their homes and their property. Since residential segregation persevered in New York City, white and black landowners and realtors in the city understood that blacks had limited places to live and that therefore they formed an exploitable consumer base. During World War I, building construction, like other industries across the nation, redirected its resources and projects toward war mobilization. In New York City, between 1914 and 1916, apartment construction ranged between 1,200 and 1,365 units per year, while in 1917 it dropped to 760, and in 1918, to 130.9 A majority of Harlem’s buildings were built in the late nineteenth century; no buildings were built between 1920 and 1924, and few after 1924.10 Black migrants, therefore, entered already crowded apartment buildings. Residential segregation and deferred building construction exacerbated conges-

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tion in Harlem. According to a 1925 study by sociologist T. J. Woofter, black density rates amounted to 336 people per acre, as compared to 223 among whites. In 1910, for example, the area of the city where the majority of blacks lived had a population of 118,032. By 1920, the population increased by 14,522. As Woofter notes, sixteen residents “to the acre were added” to the area with virtually no other building construction. Landlords subdivided single-family homes and increased the number of dwellings rented, resulting in housing congestion and a high presence of lodgers within black households.11 By the late 1920s, Harlem apartment buildings had become tenements. According to Ira De Reid, industrial secretary for the New York Urban League, housing rented by blacks had few improvements since they first moved in twenty-five or thirty years before.12 Many of the cold-water flats, which had no running hot water, were “railroad apartments,” only one room wide and with all rooms directly connected like train cars. Reid concluded that only 22 percent of the apartments were in “good” condition. As migrants loaded into already cramped apartments, “the poorly built and frequently dilapidated quarters were taxed beyond the limit.” Twenty percent of the families lived in cold-water flats heated by stoves, while the remaining families resided in heated buildings. Landlords charged more for heated apartments, however. Approximately 87 percent of heated apartments cost more than ten dollars per room; the average for the unheated rooms was $7.80.13 In some cases, families shared a sink placed between the rooms. Many blacks lived in apartments without gas and electricity. Where gas was available, landlords agreed to install electrical connections only if tenants paid an additional fee per month. Tenants constantly complained to their landlords about repairs; they especially demanded heat and hot water. Other demands included repairs for tubs, walls, roofs, and floors, as well as insect and rodent control.14 Harlemites paid higher rents than whites living in comparable living arrangements in Manhattan. Between 1919 and 1926, black tenants’ rents increased from $21.64 to $41.77 per month, according to the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning.15 In comparing the mean average rent for three-room apartments in Harlem and other areas of New York City, the survey reported that Harlem tenants paid an average of eight dollars more than New York City tenants for a three-bedroom apartment, ten dollars more for a four-bedroom apartment, and seven dollars more for a five-bedroom apartment.16 In What the Tenement Family Has and What It Pays for It, Carey Batchelor, of the welfare agency United Neighborhood Houses, noted that blacks in West Harlem earned approximately 17 percent less than the typical family in the entire city, but paid three dollars more per room per month. Landlords also charged black tenants higher rents than whites living in the

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same building. To justify differential rent rates, landlords claimed that black tenants abused their property more than whites. According to one landlord, black tenants were “harder on the place,” and they would “not pay as promptly or with as little solicitation” as whites.17 Period of tenancy also determined the difference between rent averages for blacks and whites in Harlem. As blacks entered Harlem and whites fled, rentals steadily increased.18 In 1925, the average market rent for three-room apartments in New York was $30.55 per month. Whites who had been living in the apartments for some years already paid less rent than the recent arrivals. For example, tenants living in the apartments since 1919 paid less than twenty dollars. Reid estimated that the market rent was 30 percent higher than rent paid by long-term occupants.19 Rent comprised a significant proportion of blacks’ expenses. According to Woofter’s study, blacks spent 23.4 percent of their income for rent, while James Ford’s Slums and Housing reports that they allocated one-third of their income for rent as compared to about one-fifth of other groups in New York City.20 Lodgers were often strangers, as well as family and friends.21 Migrants even double-rented lodging rooms, using the “hot bed system,” where a day worker and a night worker shared the same bed; while one worked, the other slept in the bed. In his study, Reid identified 3,314 lodgers among the 2,400 families living in 2,326 apartments; thus, each household had on average more than one lodger. Similarly in Woofter’s study, 513 families (or 32 percent) of 1,627 families harbored a total of 874 lodgers.22 The presence of lodgers often prompted landlords to increase rents since lodgers contributed to greater wear and tear on buildings.23 The crowding caused by the “segregation situation” forced migrants to endure unsanitary housing conditions, negligent landlords, and high rents. It also induced tenants to mobilize the community to lower their rents.

“The Women Were the Ones at the Bottom of It” During the late fall and early winter months of 1916, Harlem’s burgeoning black community mobilized around the issue of the neighborhood’s rising rents and poor housing conditions. Black women led this community-wide tenant campaign against the extortion of landlords. The gathering of black and white tenants, the Urban League, and other community institutions for a series of mass meetings spotlighted Harlemites’ expressions of their community rights and the exploitation of both white and black landlords, alike. Black and white tenants demanded fair rents, healthy housing conditions, and landlord accountability as their community rights. These tenant campaigns especially illustrate the political activity of black women in galvanizing

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various factions of the black community, including the New York Age, neighborhood associations, black churches, and the Urban League. The series of mass meetings especially zeroed in on the role of black realtors and landlords in exploiting black tenants, highlighting not only class conflict but also intraracial class tension among blacks. Despite increasing black presence in the neighborhood, many whites desired to remain in Harlem. To obtain high rents, landlords took advantage of residential segregation. They either increased the rents of white tenants, hoping that they would leave for cheaper housing, or evicted them in order to charge black tenants higher rent. On October 2, 1916, Mrs. Winnie Jones and residents of 143rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues formed the Neighborhood Association (NA) in her apartment at 237 West 143rd Street. The NA intended to raise funds in order “to finance a campaign against the extortionate rentals which are being forced upon them by both colored and white agents.”24 They collected 109 signatures on a petition to send to their apartment owners, real estate agents, and newspapers. William McNichols of the Negro Civic Improvement League (NCIL) joined the NA and collected rent receipts from white tenants and compared them to the black tenants’.25 White tenants also residing on 143rd Street circulated a petition amongst themselves requesting that the owners allow them to remain in the apartment buildings. Their petition explained that it was “unfair to be forced to move when they have no objection to living in adjacent houses to their colored neighbors.”26 The white tenants’ petition framed the housing situation in explicit racial terms, stating, “We understand that the whole scheme is to obtain more rents for the apartments, which, it is claimed, colored people are willing to pay.”27 Both black and white tenants understood the landlords’ motives as a form of exploitation. In order to open up discussion, the New York Age invited the landlords and realtors to whom the tenants sent petitions to explain “the charge made that they have increased the rentals for Negro tenants as compared with rentals paid by former white tenants.”28 Only one realtor responded, Charles A. Knowles, a black man, of the real estate firm C. A. Knowles and Company. While denying any role in raising tenants’ rent, Knowles explained that “there are times, for instance, that the white tenant paid twenty five dollars for an apartment, but with the threatened invasion of colored tenants the landlord reduces their rent five to ten dollars, in order to keep his white tenants.” Landlords used rent reduction as a tactic to maintain the white majority. Racial and community loyalty, Knowles indicated, motivated landlords to reduce the rents. But, he added, once “the threatened invasion of the colored tenants becomes a fact . . . the rental list is returned to its former amount, namely twenty-five dollars a month.” White

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tenants residing on the 143nd Street block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, however, disagreed.29 With the aid of the Urban League and the NCIL, the Neighborhood Association organized a “monster mass meeting” at Public School 89, at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. As the Age explained, “this meeting was the direct outcome of the working of a committee of women residing on the block in question. . . . These women exerted themselves actively in circulating the call for the meeting and in influencing the people to attend.” Enoch W. Newton, the president of the NCIL, presided over the meeting, which was well attended. According to the New York Age, “more than 1,500 people of all classes crowded the assembly room to protest against the foisting upon them of excessive rentals,” including “Ministers, physicians, lawyers, real estate men, business men, plain workers and laborers of all ranks, with a liberal attendance of women.” The first speaker, Mr. Burton, a white resident who had lived in the neighborhood for a decade, declared that the maximum rent whites paid ten years ago was thirty dollars. Now, Burton noted, “colored tenants are paying $33, notwithstanding that the rent had been decreased for the whites during that period to $26”; thus, landlords raised rents for blacks rather than restoring them to the original rate for whites. In fact, he claimed that his landlord unashamedly announced his intentions, when “he and other white tenants had been notified to move in order to make room for the colored tenants, the reason being frankly given colored tenants would pay higher rentals.”30 The organizers revealed that both black and white realtors were responsible for raising rents in Harlem. Many black tenants believed that black realtors were especially culpable. Black realtors John M. Royall and George W. Royall of the firm of John M. Royall, at 21 West 134th Street, which managed the houses at 148, 202, and 240 West 143rd street, and John Nail of the firm Nail and Parker, at 145 West 135th Street, also attended the meeting. Although most of the speakers were men, as the prime organizers of the meeting, black women vigorously voiced their views. As the New York Age states, “it was difficult for the presiding officer to secure a respectful hearing for these speakers.” Convinced that the “colored real estate agents were in large degree responsible for the abnormal increase in rentals,” Harlem tenants had “a decided aversion to hearing them.” The audience’s barbs, especially from the women, the New York Age suggests, rattled a representative of one of the realtors. “Their hisses and outspoken protests,” explained the black weekly, “completely and effectively overwhelmed him, and he was compelled to desist.” Through the preponderance of their presence and their discordant utterances, black women shaped the discourse on rents at the meeting, spotlighting the culpability of black realtors. According to the New York Age, the

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recent deluge of realty agencies “spr[ang] up in Harlem because of the opportunities offered to exploit the Negro tenantry.” Many tenants believed that the mass meeting was a success. Afterward, one black and one white landlord reduced their rents from “$1 to $3 per apartment.”31 But the meeting not only delivered a reduction of rent; it also empowered tenants to directly challenge negligent landlords in court.32 In November, the tenants of 22–24 and 26–28 West 137th Street filed a complaint with the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (NLUCAN) against the Grohman Brothers realty firm for not providing heat. Mrs. C. DeSilva, a tenant in the apartment building at 26–28 West 137th Street, collected signatures for a petition to be submitted to the owner, Cassel Cohen. Before she submitted the petition, the landlord turned on the heat and placed a notice, dated November 10, on apartment doors announcing that in five days all of the rents would be raised from one to three dollars per apartment. Mrs. DeSilva immediately called J. T. Clark, an officer of the Housing Bureau of the NLUCAN, and with his assistance, she circulated another petition. The petition, which was signed by most of the tenants, protested the raised rents and, more importantly, poignantly delineated why the rents should be decreased: We claim that a decrease is more in order than increase for the following reasons: That coal has been reduced to its normal price, and it is not probable that coal will be any higher this year than it was last. That the assessed valuation of nearly all properties in this colored section has almost yearly been reduced, hence the taxes are less. That the expense of upkeep and management of these houses have been very low. That for several years returns from a fully occupied house has brought the investment nearer to the period of amortization. We feel therefore that an increase in our rent would be to take advantage of the fact that colored people have few places to which they can move, even if they refuse to pay this increase.33

The tenants effectively charged that the increase in maintenance fees was a facade. As the petition declared, the landlord augmented rents because “colored people have few places to which they can move.” The Grohman Brothers real estate firm was “neglectful of the comfort and convenience of the tenants to a shameful degree.” Furthermore, tenants claimed that the landlord

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“allowed [the garbage] to remain unremoved for lack of a dumbwaiter service,” and they endured poorly lit halls and low water pressure. As the New York Age reported, “the water pressure was so low that top floor tenants had difficulty in getting water at any time, and many times could get none at all.”34 The NLUCAN forwarded the petition to Cassel Cohen, owner of the buildings. In addition to the petition, Mr. Clark of the league’s Housing Bureau sent a letter to Cohen, explaining that the tenants would “resist this unwarranted increase in rents,” and would “like a better excuse than the one already given, feeling that they were unfairly treated.”35 In a letter dated November 16, Cassel Cohen stated that the “premises are leased to Messrs. Grohman Bros.” Clark replied that Grohman Brothers irresponsibly managed the buildings on 137th Street and 143rd Street, as well as the other buildings under its care. Clark also warned Cohen that “some agitation . . . will be taken up if these criticisms are proven to be correct.”36 On November 17, Grohman Brothers served Mrs. DeSilva a writ of dispossession, claiming that she failed to pay her rent, and she was summoned to appear at the Municipal Court of the Seventh District at 70 Manhattan Street. According to the New York Age, Grohman intended to intimidate the tenants who signed the petition and especially to stop Mrs. DeSilva from organizing the building. Once the New York Age learned of DeSilva’s summons, the black weekly immediately provided her with legal counsel, attorney Wilford H. Smith. Before the court case, Grohman told tenants “that the matter would be dropped, they would not be disturbed, the writ of dispossession might be destroyed and that it would not be necessary to appear in court.” Mrs. DeSilva and Smith, nonetheless, arrived in court at the “hour named,” where they found Grohman and his attorney “making it appear that it had been intended to fool Mrs. DeSilva into contempt of court.” In court, Smith obtained a week’s deferment. In the interim, Grohman attempted to placate Mrs. DeSilva, assuring her that she could remain in the apartment for twenty dollars per month. In exchange, she would repay him one dollar for the cost of the dispossess warrant. While DeSilva’s compliance might have broken the tenants’ unity and induced others to seek individual redress, she refused to pay any court fees or accept any concession not offered to the other tenants. DeSilva’s defiance reflected her commitment to the collective power of the tenants, as well as calling attention to commonalities with tenants in other buildings managed by Grohman. Thus, tenants on 137th Street collectively contended that Grohman Brothers was generally negligent. As the Age concluded, “tenants of the two houses [22–24 and 26–28] are practically a unit in the determination to fight the arbitrary and uncalled for raise in the rents, and they are

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determined to force the less[or]s to make repairs that are absolutely necessary to comfort.” Several weeks later, DeSilva and women from 143rd Street organized a series of mass meetings about high rents in the district.37 In December, the tenants organized two more mass meetings to be held within days of each other. They held the first meeting on December 14 at the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church. The Age called it the “largest demonstration in the Harlem section.” Reverend Frank M. Hyder, of St. James Presbyterian Church, and Fred R. Moore, editor of the New York Age, addressed the meeting in response to increased rents, and exhorted renters “to not allow themselves to be used by agents and landlords as has been the case in the past.”38 The tenants scheduled the second mass meeting for December 19 at St. James Presbyterian Church. “The women who reside in the block on West 143rd between Seventh and Eighth avenues, have made a strong and consistent campaign against the exorbitant and unnecessary rentals charged by Harlem real estate agents, not only on that particular block, but throughout the whole neighborhood,” pronounced the New York Age. These women as well as “Mrs. C. DeSilva from West 137th Street . . . were the prime movers in the campaign.”39 Reverend Hyder opened the meeting, and J. M. Green presided. Black realtor John M. Royall remarked that the rent campaign was foolish. Royall had “never heard of such a thing as bettering the condition of the renting class by providing lower rent to them.” He argued “that when the cost of living is reduced the rent problem would be solved.” He wondered why there was no movement for lowering the cost of living instead. When someone suggested that high rents increased the cost of living, Royall became silent. In an aggressive manner, he declared, “I want to know the object of these meetings. Who suggested the movement? I have never heard of one before. Why are they held in St. James Church, and why should the Session allow the meeting to be called here when the congregation wasn’t asked about it?” Mr. Green and another individual named W. A. McNichols tried explaining to Royall that this was the third of a series of meetings. They reminded him that he attended the first meeting at P.S. 89 and that the tenants held the second meeting at Salem Methodist Episcopal Church with Reverend Hyder as the main speaker. Reverend Cullen of Salem Church suggested that Reverend Hyder invite the women to hold their next meeting at St. James Presbyterian Church. “But,” the Age remarked, “Mr. Royall, it seemed, would pay no attention to these explanations.” Instead, Royall proclaimed that the movement was not for the betterment of the community, that there were ulterior motives, and that “it was nothing but a socialist idea or grafting scheme.” McNichols, according to the Age, defended Reverend Hyder and the women

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and “decried Mr. Royall’s attitude.” According to McNichols, “the movement was projected by the women, worked up by the women, and if it was a political or grafting scheme, then the women were the ones at the bottom of it.”40 The “grafting scheme” was short-lived. But for three months black women led a neighborhood-wide tenant campaign against opportunistic landlords. These attempts to mobilize the community against exploitative landlords overlapped with community conflicts over the roles that black women should play in the public sphere as community leaders.41 While black women’s role in the housing campaign reflected their responsibilities to protect the home, it also challenged patriarchal authority over issues of politics and economics. More broadly, the mass meetings informed Harlemites of landlords’ profiteering schemes, particularly the complicity of black realtors. These exchanges highlighted not only intraracial class conflict—between tenants and renters— but also both conflicts among the elite and solidarity across classes. The New York Age, the NLUCAN, and the NCIL wholeheartedly sided with the tenants, stirring up debate on the rent issues as well as offering legal aid, among other services. More importantly, the campaign helped set up political networks that tenants, black journalists, and neighborhood associations employed in the 1920s, when battles between landlords and tenants erupted in the streets, the courts, and the state legislature.

Community Rights and Tenant Mobilization during the Housing Crisis In the postwar era, dwindling housing construction, exorbitant rents, and the increase of the city’s population precipitated a housing shortage. The housing crisis prompted a citywide tenant movement aimed at reducing and stabilizing rent rates. Tenant organizations employed an array of tactics, including rent strikes, to pressure landlords to reduce rents. By 1919, judges and politicians entered the fray and generally sided with the tenants. In 1919 and 1920, state and city officials passed ordinances that shaped dispossession and eviction proceedings. In April 1920, the New York State legislature passed a series of laws, known as the April Rent Laws, to protect tenants, and especially to defer and contest evictions. On September 27, 1920, the legislature passed the Emergency Rent Laws. The laws strengthened city ordinances requiring landlords to provide maintenance services and empowered judges to reduce rents and convict landlords of misdemeanors. More specifically, the laws eliminated some of the abuses of oral agreements by putting emphasis on tenants attaining written leases, strengthened city ordinances that required landlords to provide services that were “necessary to the proper or customary use of a

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building,” made it more difficult for landlords to evict tenants, and temporarily placed limits on landlords’ rights to set rents.42 Throughout Harlem, neighborhood associations, judges, lawyers, and politicians held forums and gave lectures to educate Harlemites about their rights as tenants and especially to expose the strategies landlords used to exploit them.43 Information abounded about how tenants could avoid such landlords, seek redress in court, and solicit information from tenant organizations, attorneys, and other associations regarding housing. The New York Urban League, for example, held a series of educational meetings in churches, libraries, and public meeting places. One of the discussions was entitled “The Tenants’ Rights under the New Rent Laws.” In 1920, the League handled an average of twenty-five housing cases per week, as well as cooperating with the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering.44 In 1924, the West Harlem Community League and Tenants Association held a meeting at Public School 81 on 119th Street and Seventh Avenue. The Tenants Association warned blacks to avoid buildings tenanted by whites because the landlords sought “to force out the white tenants, paying reasonable rental and then compel the colored tenants to pay twice as much.” C. H. Fuller, executive secretary of the Harlem Board of Commerce, advised tenants to withhold their rent if landlords demanded higher rents from them than from their white tenants and “to take the case to the Seventh District Municipal Court, where the efforts of the profiteering landlord would be properly dealt with.”45 Similarly, at a meeting held at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo Florez, of 101 West 136th Street, tenants declared war on landlords, especially black landlords. “The colored landlord is harder on colored tenants—people of his own race—than are the white landlords, with the possible exception of the absentee landlords,” claimed one of the officers at the meeting.46 In 1923, Attorney Anna J. Robinson started a column titled “Legal Talks” in the New York Amsterdam News. The column informed black tenants of their rights in the wake of the Emergency Rent Laws and warned tenants of the ploys of unscrupulous landlords and con artists. In one of her earliest columns, Robinson urged Harlemites not to sign leases priced according to the number of tenants. If additional people, such as lodgers, occupied the premises, the landlords would increase the rent, accordingly.47 Considering the large segment of the black population living as lodgers, Robinson’s advice aided lessees in avoiding contractual loopholes. More importantly, perhaps, she encouraged tenants to go to court on their own behalf, explaining that “it is to the advantage of tenants very often to have their differences settled in court, and they should not hesitate to allow the landlord to take them there when their unreasonable demands are refused.” Asserting that “there is noth-

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ing to lose and everything to be gained by having the courts settle disputes between landlords and tenants,”48 Robinson empowered Harlemites by equipping them with “legal talk” and championing them to trust to their own defense of themselves. Robinson’s column also urged Harlemites to protect themselves as citizens. When blacks went to court, they not only protected their own homes but also exercised their community rights. In addressing the negligence of landlords, Robinson informed her readers that “inadequate supply of water to upper floors is a violation of the Tenement House Law, punishable by fine and imprisonment.” In addition to advising tenants to take landlords to court, Robinson told them to openly defy landlords. “As a last resort, refuse to pay the rent. On being summoned to court for non-payment of rent, state facts to the court,” she explained. In the midst of debate over the Emergency Rent Laws, many judges supported the tenants and not only fined landlords for negligence but also ordered them to repair or to improve apartments within a time limit or else be fined or imprisoned. In these circumstances, tenants deposited their rents with the clerk of the court. Robinson exhorted Harlemites to embrace a sense of entitlement as citizens, as well as to take advantage of the political atmosphere.49 She alerted Harlemites to the debate over the scheduled expiration of the Emergency Rent Laws on February 15, 1924, and advised tenants to involve themselves in the movement for the renewal of the laws. According to Robinson, “colored tenants, living in Harlem, are most shamefully exploited.”50 She warned that the landlords intended to “abolish the emergency laws.”51 Robinson argued that it was black tenants’ duty to join the campaign, and “not be backward in supporting any movement which has for its purpose the continued restraint of landlords.” She entreated Harlemites to assess how “every candidate for the Legislature in the primaries and general elections stands on the rents laws.” The question of high rents was not only a matter of the pecuniary relationship between landlords and tenant; it was fundamentally a political issue that demanded the black community’s attention as well as participation. Robinson made a clarion call to Harlemites as political actors: “Every tenant should be certain as to the attitude on this question of the candidate for the Assembly in his district before he cast his vote in November. Landlords are certainly alive to the importance of the issue and will protect their interests. Let us protect ours.” A month later in October, the New York Amsterdam News highlighted some of the essential issues for the upcoming November election and pinpointed the heightened importance of racial consciousness in the relationship between neighborhood electoral politics and housing. The editorial demanded, “ELECTIVE REPRESENTATION for the

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Negro by the Negro” and “RETENTION of the Emergency Rent Laws.” In this way, Robinson urged blacks to take seriously the community right to fair and affordable housing, which they should exercise through the political process. As tenants mobilized themselves to go to court to obtain rent deductions and transform the housing conditions, they began to connect the housing crisis and the citywide tenant movement with local party politics.52

Tenant Resistance in the Courts Equipped with knowledge about their rights as tenants, Harlemites defiantly took their landlords to court. The Seventh District Court adjudicated more disputes between tenants and landlords than any municipal court in the five boroughs. Accordingly, Harlemites called the district court “rent court.”53 As blacks arrived in Harlem in droves, landlords employed many of the same tactics as before. They evicted white tenants to open the apartments to blacks for higher rents, and if that failed, they tried other ploys. For example, in 1923, Louis Klein, a white landlord, offered his white tenants one hundred dollars if they moved. When the tenants refused, Klein raised the rent 100 percent and withheld heat and hot water. The magistrate fined Klein $250 and sentenced him to ten days in the workhouse for failure to provide heat and hot water.54 Similarly, in February 1926, a white landlord, David Rosenbloom, paid the first month’s rent and moving expenses of a black tenant, John Yearwood, in order to induce white tenants to move out. Yearwood claimed that Rosenbloom paid him two hundred dollars to make noise. Although Rosenbloom denied Yearwood’s allegation, he admitted to paying Yearwood’s rent and moving expenses.55 In spite of Harlem’s black majority, many whites still tried to maintain all-white apartment buildings. In September 1923, the court exonerated black realtor Charles Bailey of charges of fraud. A “clique” of white tenants had complained that he collected money on an apartment with the intent to defraud. Bailey believed that the white tenants framed him because they “objecte[d] to colored persons moving into neighborhoods and apartment buildings occupied by white people.”56 Black landlords also exploited tenants of their own race. George M. Royall, a black realtor, unsuccessfully tried to cheat a black tenant. In October 1923, Royall rented an apartment at 119 West 129th Street from the owner, Stfanel Psuik, for sixty-five dollars and then sublet it to Mrs. Major Jones under contract for $150 a month. Once Mrs. Jones learned that Royall originally rented the apartment, she refused to pay. He promptly sued her. Ruling in Mrs. Jones’s favor, Judge Panken called Royall “a veritable parasite” and condemned him as “one of the worst enemies of your own race. You are preying

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on your own flesh and blood, profiting by their misfortunes and their great difficulty in getting a place to live. You are a parasite and should be held up to public scorn where all may see you just for what you are.”57 During the housing crisis, the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age reported tenants’ successful campaigns against landlords. The reportage broadcasted black tenants’ refusal to accept deplorable housing conditions, furnished Harlem readers with models of tenants’ defiance, and targeted opportunistic landlords. In February 1925, in an article titled “Scores Secure Rent Reductions,” the Amsterdam News noted that with more than a dozen tenants winning rent reductions, it was evident that landlords were raising rents “following the flight of white people when colored people moved in the neighborhood.”58 The abrupt departure of whites forewarned Harlemites of the machinations of scheming landlords. The black weeklies also showcased the advocacy of black politicians. In 1928, after receiving complaints to his office, Alderman Fred Moore, owner and editor of the New York Age, inspected the building in question at 207 West 119th Street. One tenant, Mrs. Florita Rogvy, claimed that the walls, the hallways, and the yard were in terrible condition and that all six rooms of her apartment were a “menace to health.” Moore contacted the owner, Edward W. Browning, who promised to dismiss the present agent and hire another. He also graciously assured them that he would provide a playground and facilities for “kiddies under proper care.”59 Black women, especially mothers, also continued their campaign against negligent landlords in court. In January 1926, two different groups of black tenants of 664 Lenox Avenue took Gilbert Martin, a white realtor, to court for withholding heat and hot water. In the first case, Mrs. Ula Mason, Albert Scott, E. Benjamin, and Alberta Rose made the complainant. At the court proceedings, the health officer reported that “the temperature [in the apartments] was the same inside as it was outside.”60 A week later, reported the Amsterdam News, “Twenty-five little babies made a complaint through their mothers against the bad ‘heat man.’” After questioning the mothers, Assistant District Attorney Charles White learned that “a number of the mothers were forced to wear their heavy coat in the house.” The women claimed that they had been without heat and hot water for over six weeks. For their babies’ sake, the women “begged the Court to insist upon their agent supplying them with steam heat and hot water.” Again the health officer reported that in many of the apartments the temperature inside matched the temperature outside. The court held Martin for five hundred dollars bail for further investigation. The black weeklies reportage of housing issues legitimized tenants’ claims of landlord negligence, offered them templates to follow to settle their own housing

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affairs, and empowered them to make demands upon landlords and the city government alike.61 Judges, public officials, and city agencies also sanctioned community empowerment. In November 1925, blacks’ complaints about unheated apartments persuaded Magistrate George Simpson of the Washington Heights court to order the Health Department to investigate housing conditions in Harlem.62 The Emergency Rent Laws, which gave tenants access to various city agencies such as the Tenement House Department, the Department of Health, and other municipal departments, allowed tenants to challenge landlords in unprecedented numbers.63 In February 1926, Magistrate Simpson fined lessor Love B. Wood $250 or ninety days in jail for failing to comply with Section 16 of the Tenement House Law, which required apartments to have direct access to fire escapes. Several rooms required direct connections with the fire-escapes, according to Inspector Walter H. Murphy.64 Only days before, five people had died in a fire in Harlem. Magistrate Simpson felt “that a small fine would not be commensurate with the offense committed. I therefore fine you the limit with the alternative of a long Workhouse sentence.” Rather than abide by the law, Wood partitioned off the apartments to create more rooms, cutting off the tenants’ access to fire-escapes in the event of a fire. Although the owner of the building was willing to destroy the partitions, as was explained in court, Wood’s greed “refused to permit it.” State agencies and the judicial system simultaneously protected black tenants and empowered them to challenge exploitative landlords in court. But state protection was temporary. By the end of the decade, the citywide tenant movement had devolved into a campaign for cheaper rents. Harlemites once again were on their own.65

“Vote Black!” With the citywide tenant movement in decline, Harlemites looked to their politicians to protect their rights as tenants. In the midst of the campaign to extend the Emergency Rent Laws, blacks reexamined their relationship to the Republican Party. Although blacks comprised the majority of voters in Assembly Districts Nineteen and Twenty-One, white Republicans controlled those seats. In other black metropolises, notably Chicago, blacks held considerable political sway in local elections. By the end of the 1920s, Chicago had even elected a black man, Oscar DePriest, to Congress. In the mid-twenties, the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age aggressively criticized white Republican and Democratic officials and voters for failing to support black candidates in their respective parties. By 1928, the New York Amsterdam

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News was flatly exhorting Harlemites to “vote black,” regardless of the political party of a candidate. At the same time, the citywide tenant movement declined in political significance, leaving the black community to fend for itself regarding the extension of the rent laws. By the mid-1920s, the tenant movement, reacting to the increasing authority of landlords and the escalation of apartment building construction, shifted its focus from efforts to extend the Emergency Rent Laws to the shortage of affordable housing. Real estate supporters claimed that with building construction, the wealthy would take the new apartments, which opened up the older, but livable apartments to working-class tenants. Amid the undeniable increase in housing construction, both the political sway of tenant organizations and the participation of the organizations’ rank and file sharply declined. As historian Joseph Spencer explains, “this opened the door to the gradual erosion of the Rent Laws,” which “reduc[ed] the number of families who could use the laws or be called upon for their retention.”66 In February 1926, the New York State legislature extended the Emergency Rent Laws until June 1, 1927, but it also exempted apartments renting at more than twenty dollars per room per month. For each remaining year of the decade, the tenant movement successfully won their battles for the continuation of the Emergency Rent Laws. But by 1929, the laws only applied to apartments renting for ten dollars or less. The Emergency Rent Laws served not to ameliorate tenant-landlord conflicts but to mitigate the “effects of the breakdown of normal competition in the housing field.”67 Racism as well as the shortage of housing remained the bedrock of the problem for most Harlemites. Builders constructed few apartment buildings in Harlem, so the black community benefitted little from increases in housing construction. Furthermore, landlords who took advantage of residential segregation still prevailed in Harlem. In many ways, the shift of attention to the housing shortage and the erosion of the rent laws redirected the tenant movement to the black community, narrowing the sense of entitlement to protection from the courts that they had only begun to put in effect. Without the aid of the citywide tenant movement, the housing problem quickly became a Harlem problem. In this context, black tenants depended heavily on their own public representatives and especially the variety of civic, religious, and cultural associations constituting Harlem’s institutional life. For much of the early twentieth century, the Amsterdam News and the New York Age faithfully supported the Republican Party, especially Abraham Grenthal, white assemblyman of the nineteenth district. Representing Central Harlem since 1923, Grenthal staunchly supported tenants and crusaded for the extension of the Emergency Rent Laws. In November 1925, he claimed that tenants

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would be “relegated to the status that existed before the Emergency Rent Laws were enacted” if they were allowed to expire. Like many advocates of the tenant movement, he insisted that the increase in building construction failed to protect working-class tenants. According to Grenthal, “the impression . . . has been erroneously created that because of the extensive building operations that have been in progress there will be no necessity for Emergency Rent Laws.” He added, “the construction of new houses has not helped one iota the tenant who pays fifteen to thirty dollars per month for an apartment.”68 In the spring of 1924 and fall of 1925, Grenthal authored a bill that protected tenants from landlords who demanded payment of rent from them in spite of the landlords’ failure to comply when charged with housing violations. With the Grenthal Bill, the tenant would pay her rent to the court until the landlord made repairs to the apartment and complied with the tenement house violations. The bill passed the Assembly but floundered and died in the Senate. The precipitous decline of the tenant movement exposed the shortcomings of Harlem’s white politicians in greater relief. After Grenthal’s reelection to the Nineteenth Assembly District in 1925, William M. Kelley, the editor of the New York Amsterdam News, authored an article titled, “White Voters Vote White,” pointing out the steadfast loyalty of white voters to white candidates, regardless of party affiliation. According to Kelley, “white voters seldom lose an opportunity to vote white and unless Negroes become imbued with the same spirit of racial loyalty, they will be denied all elective representation.” If blacks wanted racial representation, they needed to vote based on race, opined Kelley. Blacks required racial consciousness and allegiance in order to gain political power.69 After another Grenthal victory in 1926, the Amsterdam News again contended that Harlemites needed to take racial loyalty seriously. Kelley questioned David E. Costuma’s support for black Republican candidates for office in his district. Costuma, the Republican leader of the Nineteenth District, effectively campaigned for white Republicans, like Grenthal, but failed, claimed the New York Amsterdam News, to put in the same effort for black Republicans. According to Kelley, “WE ARE NOT OPPOSED to Grenthal. The fact is, so far, we have supported him each time he has been a candidate. But from all indications the political game is not played on the level in the Nineteenth District under David B. Costuma, and the time has come to acquaint the voters with the conditions so that in the future they can either play the game Mr. Costuma plays or refuse to play with him at all.” The Amsterdam News asserted unequivocally, “IT SO HAPPENS that Grenthal and Costuma are reported to have had the same racial origin and that a large number of the white voters in the Nineteenth District are identified with that same racial group. This makes it easy for us to conclude that race,

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and not party, is the deciding factor in Nineteenth District Politics.” In order to protect the interests of the race, the black weekly contended that black majority districts needed the representation of black politicians. This could be achieved either by having black Democrat and black Republican candidates both running for the same office or by supporting independent black candidates for an office that could be controlled by the black vote.70 During the 1927 and 1928 election years, the Amsterdam News and the New York Age openly criticized Grenthal as a representative of the racial politics of white officials in the Republican Party. The black weeklies asserted that Grenthal cooperated with white Democrats to maintain white dominance in his own district and throughout Harlem. “Vote black,” the Amsterdam News commanded black voters in its November 2, 1927, editorial of the same title. The voter should vote according to the “interests of himself and his group.” Party affiliation, according to this line of reasoning, was secondary, and no different than the position white voters had been taking all along. Despite the Amsterdam News’s loyalty and long support of the Republican Party, it urged blacks to vote for George E. Hall, a black Democrat, for the office of alderman for the Nineteenth District. This would “give the white voters a taste of their own medicine in re-electing Abraham Grenthal repeatedly and defeating two successive Negro candidates for alderman on the same ticket.”71 White leadership of both parties encouraged whites to vote along racial lines. In mid-March 1928, the New York Amsterdam News proclaimed that black voters “must make their vote a force to be reckoned with, not a toy be played with.” According to the paper, Republican Grenthal and Democrat Masterson, who was also white and was running for the office of alderman of the Nineteenth District, had agreed to encourage their respective voters to support white candidates for the opposing party. “OUT OF THE WELTER of throat cutting and back-stabbing in the Nineteenth and Twenty-first districts one clear fact emerges: if the Negroes are to have their own leaders and their due representation, they must bring to bear their full political strength, both in elections and in party councils.”72 In late summer, the New York Age noted that “the unscrupulous methods and autocratic practices by which leader Abraham Grenthal and his supporters have been able to retain control of party affairs of the Republicans of the 19th A.D. are responsible for a steady and growing revolt among the voters.”73 The New York Age accused Grenthal of abandoning the Republican Party’s policy of majority rule and encouraged blacks to raise their racial consciousness and to vote against the “Grenthal regime.” The Age solicited the opinion of the former leader of the Republican Party, David E. Costuma, who encouraged Grenthal to rebuild the party rather than run for assembly. Costuma

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believed that Harlem should be run by “someone from the group that is so largely in the majority” and advised Grenthal to make a selection accordingly. Grenthal’s leadership, therefore, not only represented white hegemony but also a rejection of the trajectory of the Republican Party, according to Costuma. The Age spotlighted the complicity of blacks in Grenthal’s chicanery. One woman, reported the Age, wrote to Reverend Dr. J. W. Brown, of Mother Zion, stating “you would have something to preach about if you had been down to that political club on 124th, Monday night. The way the Negroes carried on was a disgrace. You talk about white folks’ niggers’—well, here are some for you.” The letter writer expected not only black solidarity but also that Reverend Brown would reel in one of his congregants, who was described as a “crooked woman.” This, in turn, suggested that he had already spoken of the necessity of black unity and the misfortunes of aligning with white people in his church. The letter writer suggested that the people lacked racial consciousness, for while they were “Negroes . . . they d[id]n’t want Negroes to do anything for them.” By highlighting Grenthal’s abandonment of the Republicans political trajectory, the Age claimed that the district should be governed by blacks since, as Costuma stated, they comprised the majority of the population. Yet claims to racial unity also figured into both black weeklies’ political strategy, for without understanding politics with a racial lens, blacks would remain powerless. As the Age noted, “the white people were silently laughing at the colored folk’s seeming utter lack of race pride.”74 As the black weeklies urged racial pride in Harlem electoral politics, the Communist Party, through the aegis of the Harlem Tenants League, encouraged Harlemites to consider the roles of class as well as politics in their plight as exploited tenants.

Harlem Tenants League: Community Politics and New Negro Community Organizing In February 1928, Richard B. Moore along with other Harlem and Washington Heights denizens established the Harlem Tenants League (HTL). Before the Great War, Moore, a native of Barbados, had joined the Socialist Party, and later in 1919, he became a member of the African Blood Brotherhood, a Black Nationalist self-defense organization.75 From the beginning, Moore, the president of the HTL, formulated the housing crisis as a race and a class problem. In the fall of 1928, Moore explained plainly in the Negro Champion how, “unable to move out of these miserable Ghettoes, the Negro masses are forced to pay the most exorbitant and outrageous rents for houses in every state of dilapidation and lack of sanitation.”76 Moore directly addressed the issue of segregation, arguing that segregation created the particular circumstance

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that enabled landlords to charge blacks high rents. During the 1928 New York assembly and congressional races, the league and candidates from the Communist Party held meetings where candidates from all political parties “explained their position on the Emergency Rent Laws.” In January of 1929, the league sent a delegation to Albany to demand new laws to protect tenants paying more than ten dollars per month for each room.77 As the June 1, 1929, Emergency Rent Laws expiration approached, Moore, the HTL, and the Daily Worker published a series of editorials on housing conditions in Harlem, highlighting the relationship between the exploitation of Harlemites as renters and as workers. In early April of 1929, the Daily Worker’s Sol Auerbach, the main contributor to the series, zeroed-in on the rows of dilapidated buildings crowding the district. Describing a hallway in one building, he wrote, “you have a sense that the walls . . . were once painted green. You know that, not because you can see the actual color of the paint thru the grime, but because you see patches of plaster with the edges of peeling paint sticking out into the dim light from the doorway.”78 Mrs. Ethel Williams, a black resident of the building, complained of the excessive costs of coal, the peeling and crumbling plaster on the walls, and the overall negligence of her landlord. As she explained to Auerbach, “the landlord won’t do anything. He says that if we want repairs we will have to take a rent raise.” Auerbach contended that the Williams’s high rents and inadequate housing conditions were tethered to their belonging to the working-class. Mrs. Williams’s husband, who had worked at the Knickerbocker Cement and Supply Company for five years, had lost his job and been unemployed for three months. As Mrs. Williams lamented, “he leaves about four or five o’clock every morning to look for a job, and if he finds one he makes about $5 a day. He has to get re-hired every day. Many days he doesn’t find any work.”79 The capitalist and the landlord belonged to the same class, argued Auerbach, adding “he [Williams] is a fellow worker who slaves thru the day, when he is given a chance” and “comes to a hovel . . . and pays a high rent to a person in the same class as his employer.”80 The Communist Party thereby transformed the discussion of housing from a problem of housing costs to the problem of capitalist exploitation. Although tenant activists and politicians, like Arthur Grenthal, framed the housing crisis as an economic issue, they did so as essentially a problem of affordability. The Communist Party, on the other hand, saw the housing crisis as a matter of landlords, a segment of the capitalist class, exploiting tenants, a segment of the working class. In targeting capitalists, the party was color blind. Thus, in another editorial, “Republican Politicians Robs Negro Tenants of ‘Higher Class’ Harlem Apartments,” Auerbach exposed the role of black politician

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and “slum lord” E. A. Johnson, a recent candidate on the Republican ticket for Congress in the November 1928 election. One of Johnson’s tenants refused to pose for a picture for the Daily Worker, because she feared “the landlord w[ould] raise my rent if he recognizes me in that picture.” Asked about Johnson’s maintenance of the building, she stated, “he’d die before he would do anything here. If you will accept a $10 raise then he’ll do something.” Auerbach contended that Johnson’s neglect reflected the city and state politicians’ malfeasance and culpability in exploiting tenants. He asserted that according to the Tenement Law of 1901, tenements built before the law, known as oldlaw buildings, “should have been condemned long ago.” In fact, the Tenement Law required old-law buildings to be updated not condemned. Auerbach’s point, however, was that laws were “useless” since they were “passed by a capitalist legislature controlled by the landlords, real estate men and others of that kind.”81Although an array of capitalists—from landlords to legislators— exploited tenants, Auerbach acknowledged the pivotal role of racism. As he explained, “so you see that segregation in housing is a matter of dollars for the landlords, just as it is for the bosses of factories, and a barbed-wire fence for the Negro workers, catching and tearing the flesh.”82 As Auerbach disclosed the conditions of Harlem tenants and the complicity of black leaders, Moore, Grace Campbell, one of the first African American women to join the Communist Party, USA, and other members of the Harlem Tenants League began organizing tenants in advance of the expiration of the Emergency Rent Laws. In mid-April, in the seventh editorial in the housing series, Moore summarized Auerbach’s previous editorials and condemned capitalism as the culprit of the housing crisis. According to Moore, “the capitalist system which segregates Negro workers into Jim-crow districts makes these doubly exploited black workers the special prey of the greedy rent-gougers.” Quoting the average wage and rent rates of black workers in New York, Moore highlighted how black workers’ low wages and high rents negatively affected the health of the black family. The Harlem Tenant League, he claimed, worked assiduously for the black community, organizing housing committees, speaking before the state legislature, and representing tenants in court. If Harlemites wanted to transform their housing conditions and lower rents, Moore charged, then they had to join the HTL, for “only the united, organized, mass pressure of the tenants and workers will avail in the least to stem this tide of rent profiteering.”83 The height of the Harlem Tenants League’s campaign came hours after the expiration of the Emergency Rent Laws. On June 1, the league paraded the streets of Harlem, protesting the still-pervasive high rents and violations of the sanitary codes. Led by the John C. Smith band, the marchers brandished

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banners that reading “Down with Rent Slavery!,” “Down with Greedy Landlord Oppression!,” “Down with Segregation and Discrimination against Negro Tenants!” Many Harlemites as well as members of organizations such as the Communist Party, the United Council of Working Class Housewives, the American Negro Labor Congress, and the Longshoremen’s Union marched from 126th Street and Fifth Avenue to 135th and Eighth Avenue, then to 145th Street and Seventh Avenue, and finally back to 135th Street, where they gathered at Dorrance Brooks Square for an open-air meeting.84 There, Moore denounced landlords, the press, the pulpit, and city officials. Solomon Harper, another black member of the Communist Party, lambasted the Tattler, a black society tabloid, for “holding the landlords up as ‘Heroes’ for ‘doing away with race lines.’” Harper, like other tenant activists before, noted that this was a scheme to raise rent for black renters and that the tabloid was “supported and financed, chiefly by means of advertisements, by the landlords of Harlem.” Like the New York Amsterdam News, the Communists argued that change could come through the ballot. As Harold Williams, a black Communist organizer for Harlem, averred, “it is only by voting for the Communist candidates in the city elections, joining the Communist Party . . . that all of us can, together, do away with this system of landlordism and capitalism, one of the products of which is segregation and discrimination against Negro workers.”85 At the end of the meeting, the HTL adopted a resolution demanding that rent controls be within the means of workers’ wages, no evictions of unemployed workers, and no discrimination in renting and selling houses.86 On June 6, other Harlem political groups held meetings at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, endorsing the renewal of the Emergency Rent Laws. The Women’s Political Study Class, the Ladies Civic Club, and the North Harlem Community Council sponsored the forum. Helen Hanning, the white chairwoman of the House Committee of New York, chastised both Democrats and Republicans for allowing the laws to expire. Tenement House Inspector William Deegan asked the public to cooperate with the department, explaining that his 268 house inspectors answered three thousand complaints in three months. Jane Crolley, head of the Ladies’ Civic Club, asked, “If the tenement house inspectors have been through Harlem during the last ten years, why has nothing been done?” No one responded. The forum endorsed two resolutions. The first demanded Mayor Walker to alleviate deplorable housing conditions and high rents, and the second supported Mrs. E. Hortense Warner, head of the Political Study Class, as candidate for alderwoman of the Twenty-First District.87 Crolley’s questioning reflected many Harlemites’ disappointment with their public officials and city governmental agencies upon the expiration of

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the Emergency Rent Laws. In its later stages, the city-wide tenant movement’s framing of the laws as primarily an economic issue addressed only the shortage of low-rent housing; it did not address the nexus between the shortage and residential segregation. In Harlem, landlords charged blacks exorbitant rents because of housing segregation as well as their economic status. The “vote black” campaign and the barrage of criticisms aimed at local government’s malfeasance—from neighborhood organizations like the Women’s Political Study Class and the HTL—converged. Harlemites believed they needed new political leadership. On June 10, at a regular meeting of the Harlem Tenants League, tenants expressed their distrust of Grenthal’s leadership. Mrs. Irene, a black resident, reported the Daily Worker, “stated that Grenthal even robbed his club and that members had circulated a hand-bill showing that campaign funds collected last fall had not been accounted for in his report of political contributions to the secretary of state.”88 A month later, the Aldermanic Branch of the Municipal Assembly adopted an ordinance retaining rent controls for apartments renting at fifteen dollars per room or less. The bill also limited landlords’ return on investments in apartments and tenements houses. The Daily Worker, in a July 12 editorial, described the legislation as “fake rent law,” since it authorized the courts, “those wily instruments of the landlords,” to decide the fate of black tenants.89 The next day, the Board of Estimate and Apportionment amended and passed the bill, but the State of New York declared the ordinance unconstitutional on the basis that the city was trespassing on a state matter.90 Throughout the remainder of the summer and fall of 1929 and then the winter and spring of 1930, the HTL and the Daily Worker maintained a strong political presence in the housing campaign, and operated as an essential instrument for black tenants to express their disenchantment with Harlem landlords and politicians. Although the HTL correctly assessed the housing situation as both a race and a class problem, as historian Mark Naison explains, it “lacked the cadre, the reputation” to build a sustained movement in Harlem.91 Indeed, the league’s critique of black realtors, landlords, and other segments of the black elite for exploiting black tenants mirrored the same assessment black tenants leveled at black landlords in 1916. But in that case, the tenants also acknowledged the activism of the New York Age and the Urban League. The HTL, on the other hand, overstated and misrepresented the ideological and political sensibilities of Harlem’s black elite. Nonetheless, the HTL politicized and empowered Harlem tenants to defend themselves in court. Like the New York Amsterdam News and other Harlem organizations before them, the league faithfully represented tenants in court and encouraged them to view the court and formal politics as instruments of change.92 Apart from

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its Communist argot, the HTL spotlighted the inefficacy of the white Republican Grenthal and the black Republican George W. Harris, owner of the New York News and member of the Real Estate Men’s Association of Trade and Commerce, a pro-realtors organization.93 In this way, whether from a “race first” perspective or the Communist Party’s class and race critique, white Republican leadership was under scrutiny. Through the aegis of the HTL, the New York Age, the New York Amsterdam News, local tenant organizations, and the courts, tenants broadcasted their disenchantment with exploitative landlords, their housing conditions, and the political leaders that represented them.

“On the Truly American Principle of Majority Rule in Politics” In the aftermath of the expiration of the Emergency Rent Laws, the black weeklies, black political leadership, and black tenants redirected their energies towards electing black representatives in Harlem. By declaring the city’s ordinance as unconstitutional, the state legislature dismantled the post–Emergency Rent Laws Harlem tenant campaign. In 1929, two black Republicans, Frances E. Rivers and Lamar Perkins, ran for office on the Republican Party ticket. Rivers ran for the Nineteenth Assembly District and Perkins for the Twenty-First District. Colonel Charles W. Fillmore, a black veteran of the Spanish-American War, won the leadership of the Nineteenth Assembly District’s Republican organization. Thereafter, Alderman Fred R. Moore and Rivers joined Fillmore to make up the slate of Republican candidates for the Nineteenth District running against the “Grenthal Machine.” George W. Harris, former alderman of the Twenty-First District, accepted the designation for the office of alderman of the Nineteenth District, against the incumbent Fred Moore. The candidates articulated their campaign in mostly racial terms. Like the New York Amsterdam News earlier, they argued that it was time for blacks to represent themselves in local politics. In early September, the Moore and Rivers camp announced “it is the issue of representation, based on the truly American principle of majority rule in politics.”94 Fillmore similarly claimed that leaders “from their own ranks familiar with their problems and responsive to their will” should represent the black community.95 Lamar Perkins also stated that he believed that black candidates should represent the majority black constituency. These arguments around majority rule were political expressions of Harlemites’ community rights. Before the primary in September, the Amsterdam News, in an editorial titled “The 19th A.D. Muddle,” labeled Harris a sellout. Harris, quipped the New York Amsterdam News, “permitted

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himself to be used as a tool to perpetuate Grenthal’s leadership.” Grenthal, on the other hand, the New York Amsterdam News asserted, should receive no blame because “LIKE MOST WHITE MEN,” he sought to subject blacks to their own personal gain. The black weekly, however, carefully articulated its support for the black candidates as an element of racial loyalty rather than as anti-white rhetoric. Harlemites should focus, the New York Amsterdam News contended, on the political behavior of blacks since whites naturally voted for the interests of white people. By September, despite both Harris and Grenthal winning the designation of the district organizations, Perkins, Moore, and Rivers won the primary, and the county committee, the body responsible for electing the executive position in the district organization, voted in Fillmore as the leader of the district. By the election in November, Harlem’s black Republicans had triumphantly won offices in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Assembly Districts. Once in office, Harlem Assemblymen Lamar Perkins and Francis Rivers immediately tackled the housing issue. On March 3, in Albany, Assemblyman Perkins introduced legislation to allow for discretionary court stays for tenants. Associations representing the landlords, such as the Real Estate Board of New York City, the Bronx Tax Payers Association, and others, protested the legislation. Harlem and other tenant organizations, many that had long fought in the tenant movement, such as the Appomattox Republican Club, the Harlem Tenants League, the Academy Tenants League, the New York Urban League, the North Harlem Community Council, the Patrick S. Dowd Democratic Association, and the Yorkville Tenants Association, supported the bill. On March 11, the bill passed. The Perkins Bill, section 1436 (a) of the Civil Practice Act, protected renters in the case landlords raised the rent. The tenant could apply for a stay of eviction for up to six months if the tenant was unable to find comparable housing. Rivers’s bill, 1446(a) of the Civil Service Act, enabled the court to stay a summary proceeding for nonpayment, providing that the tenant could produce evidence of a violation of the Multiple Dwelling Law or Health Department Code.96 Ultimately, Perkins’s and Rivers’s bills gave black tenants only a modicum of protection from landlords. Yet the citywide tenant campaign, the local Harlem marches and mass meetings, and the “vote black” campaign not only galvanized Harlemites as political actors in their churches, their homes, in the streets, and in the courts, but also mustered within them the wherewithal to elect black legislators to their local assembly districts.

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Conclusion Harlemites’ court battles against exploitative landlords, demands for the continuation of the Emergency Rent Laws, and election of black representatives in the late 1920s represented more than a decade of community mobilizing for better and cheaper housing conditions. High rents and unhealthful housing conditions were instrumental in mobilizing the black community. Individually and collectively, black tenants protested landlords’ exploitative practices in the courts and in the community. Mass meetings proved informative for all in attendance, often illustrating that black landlords were complicit in rent profiteering. The mass meetings also displayed the organizing efforts and the community activism of black women. Relegated to menial jobs and responsible for the domestic sphere—homecare and childrearing—black women were particularly affected by high rents and poor housing conditions. More significantly, black women were the center of black institutional life. They used their associational affiliations and networks, such as churches and welfare organizations, as neighborhood resources to educate and especially to organize the black community. In this way, for many black women, the tenant campaign represented a defense of their homes and community. Through their earlier efforts, blacks were already organized as part of the citywide tenant campaign that arose in the post–World War I era. Although the Emergency Rent Laws and the tenant campaign revealed and challenged rent profiteering, they were effective only at the individual level. More importantly, the laws never directly attacked residential segregation. Once again, even as the city became sensitive to tenants, especially working-class renters, state laws ignored racism. Structural change demanded antiracist legislation directed at residential segregation, which would not come about until the 1940s.97 Harlemites defended themselves against exploitative landlords, mobilizing in their own interests as defiant tenants in “rent court” and as racially conscious voters in the “vote black” campaign for Harlem’s political representation. As blacks rallied to reduce rents and improve their housing conditions, the mushrooming of commercial entertainment in Harlem apartments stirred up a debate on the proper use and policing of apartment buildings in the neighborhood. When Harlem came into vogue, whites throughout the city, across the nation, and the world flooded neighborhood night spots. In the midst of this white invasion, blacks began to query, whose Harlem is this, anyway?

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“Maintaining ‘a High Class of Respectability’ in Negro Neighborhoods” Contestation and Congregation in Harlem’s Geography of Vice and Leisure during the Prohibition era

In 1914, the New York Age declared, “Harlem is infested with too many saloons for the good of the 40,000 Negroes in that section.” Troubled by the abuse of alcohol that made “you fight your mother,” the black weekly targeted the preponderance of white-owned saloons and their unchallenged hold upon black patronage, lamenting that “the bulk of the profits go to the white saloonkeeper and the barrelhouse owner.” The Age argued, furthermore, that buffet flats, or flats where patrons could stay overnight to enjoy illicit pleasures, grew out of the saloons and barrelhouses. The black weekly hoped to mobilize respectable men and women to “put out of business” white-owned saloons or to compel them to “change their ways.” Among many Harlemites, the idea of the Negro Mecca was based on the autonomy of black enterprises and the respectability of the black community. Yet white proprietors not only controlled commercial real estate, but also had “no interest in the morals of our [black] women.” The black weekly’s editorial revealed the vulnerability of the Negro Mecca, charging that white ownership in Harlem threatened the economic and moral integrity of the black community.1 By galvanizing their efforts, the black community might save its reputation and black womanhood, as well as reinvigorate black entrepreneurialism. Harlemites’ efforts at community building were fundamentally at loggerheads with white commercial real estate ownership. As the Age asserted, white leisure places profited from black patronage and engendered immorality and illicit activity in places of public amusement and residential-based leisure spaces. While black leaders tried to rub out vice activity among blacks, they targeted white leisure proprietors as facilitators of illicit activity in the black community. During the Prohibition era, whites expanded their stranglehold on leisure institutions in order to cater to the flood of slumming whites crowding in Harlem’s cabarets and nightclubs. The excesses of the Prohibition, many black leaders believed, transformed and worsened the cultural, social, economic, and racial landscape of the black community. 121

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Competing visions of Harlem as a cultural and intellectual space often overlapped, clashed, and reconciled with intraracial tensions. Among slumming whites, the police, and white cabaretiers there was no clear distinction between Harlem as an exotic space for pleasure and as a residential neighborhood for raising a family. Of course, blacks had multiple and competing visions of Harlem. While some blacks believed that they had the community right to frequent crowded flats and dance lustfully to blues and jazz music until the break of dawn, others described this behavior as criminal, and contended that they had the community right to live in safe, respectable dwellings. James Weldon Johnson tried to proffer a corrective to whites’ portrayal of blacks as perpetual partygoers, stating matter-of-factly, “no one can seriously think that the two hundred thousand Negroes in Harlem spend their nights on any such pleasance.” He admitted “Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, [and] the adventurous.” But the truth of the matter is, he wrote, “most of them [Harlemites] never see a night club.”2 Of course, Harlem comprised churchgoers as well as prostitutes, social workers as well as numbers runners; vice activity had always been an unwelcome element of many urban black neighborhoods.3 Prohibition and whites’ control over Harlem night spots indelibly compounded this long-standing feature of the black community, however. This chapter examines Harlemites’ contestations over black leisure culture and vice activity in public and private spaces during the Prohibition era. The expansion of white ownership of Harlem leisure institutions and the throng of slumming whites threatened the autonomy of the black community and their community rights. In pre-Prohibition Harlem, black patrons proudly welcomed and enjoyed black- and white-owned commercial recreation that catered primarily to them. Black-owned enterprises especially espoused a sense of belonging, self-determination, and autonomy among blacks. In Prohibition era New York, however, the flood of whites to Harlem’s clubs narrowed blacks’ options for adult recreation, challenging the integrity of Harlem as their Negro Mecca. As chapter 1 demonstrates, the idea of the black district as a Negro Mecca was always suspect since white proprietors owned the majority of businesses in Harlem. The Negro Mecca, therefore, was primarily the preserve of black patrons, privileging and endowing black consumers with a sense racial entitlement. This privileged position of black patrons in the district’s cabarets and nightclubs ended during the Prohibition era, for night spots either wholly prohibited black patrons or wealthier white consumers priced them out. In this sense, Prohibition meant the resegregation and privatization of black leisure spaces in Harlem.

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Harlemites’ campaign for community rights, I argue, grew out of their efforts to recreate spaces for congregation and reclaim economic and cultural autonomy, on the one hand, and to reestablish community respectability and safety, on the other. Prohibition, therefore, engendered two overlapping and competing responses from Harlemites. One was their operating different forms of residential-based leisure, including speakeasies, buffet flats, and socials known as “rent parties” that tenants threw to collect money to defray rent costs, not only for entertainment and pleasure but also to recreate and renew black autonomous spaces for entrepreneurship, community sociability, and cultural production.4 Harlemites reconfigured residential space as sites of sexual, economic, and cultural exchange. With the expansion of white and black patrons, black women and men used the relative privacy of apartments, boarding rooms, and other kinds of residential spaces for prostitution. As chapter 2 demonstrates, New York City’s political economy generally restricted black men and black women to the service and domestic sector. The privacy of apartments provided enterprising black women and men alternative commercial and labor opportunities and a semblance of cultural autonomy. Rent parties, however, were primarily social and cultural institutions, though they might be used for sexual and economic exchange. At these apartment socials, participants achieved a certain degree of cultural autonomy and, by extension, power. Overall, these different forms of apartment recreation illustrate Harlemites’ efforts to reclaim their community right to use Harlem public and private space as they chose. By using their own homes as creative spaces for pay, play, and pleasure, blacks nurtured a community consciousness and a leisure culture that had been developing in Harlem before Prohibition.5 The other response came from black and white reformers and civicminded blacks, who protested against immoral, illicit, and harmful behavior in places of public amusement and especially residential-based leisure. Many blacks viewed these commercial amusements in apartments as disreputable to Harlem and dangerous to the future of the race. As historian Michelle Mitchell and others have illustrated, blacks perceived the home and the household as a site of racial uplift and respectability. While blacks embraced the politics of domesticity to combat challenges to black women’s morality and femininity, black men often employed it to reinforce patriarchy within the household.6 In this way, Harlemites struggles over the proper behavior in apartments and places of public amusement reflected the peculiarities of migration, political economy, and gender in New York City.7 Before Prohibition, the New York Age, as the voice of black business in Harlem, framed white

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saloons, cabarets, and barrelhouses as purveyors of immorality and especially a threat to black womanhood. The Age tied the spread of illicit activity and its expansion in residential areas to white ownership. Similarly, the high ratio of black women to black men and especially the number of unmarried black women in the black community prompted the Urban League to tie the preponderance of lodgers in Harlem apartments to the increasing number of black women arrested for prostitution. By framing the dual issues of housing and prostitution as a problem of urbanization, the league encouraged tenant and civic responsibility and cooperated with various reform agencies, including the Committee of Fourteen, an all-white anti-vice agency. During the Prohibition era, slumming whites and white proprietors, argued black leaders, spread immortality in the black community. More specifically, the expansion of white ownership exacerbated and expanded illicit behavior in places of public and private amusements. The casualties, argued the New York Age, were black women and children. The spread of prostitution, high child delinquency rates, and accounts of intraracial violence in apartment buildings precipitated another moral panic among Harlem tenants, landlords, journalists, and black and white reformers. Harlem’s denizens detested the boisterous and sometimes violent nightly entertainment in the apartment buildings. Tenants and building owners initiated letter-writing campaigns, demanding the eradication of house parties along with the allegedly lewd men and women that often accompanied them. These forms of activism represented tenants’ attempts to protect their privacy and their home life. The black weeklies also joined the local reform movement, targeting parental delinquency as an explanation for high rates of child delinquency. This community activism on the part of the NYUL, Harlem tenants, and the black weeklies spotlights their discontent with living conditions in their apartment buildings and their individual and collective endeavors to remake Harlem into a respectable community. The flood of white proprietors and patrons to Harlem directly challenged blacks’ community rights as privileged patrons and as respectable residents of Harlem. While blacks enjoyed a means to congregate and reclaim autonomy in residential leisure places, Harlem’s geography of vice also expanded there, generating an indigenous and interracial reform movement targeting vice activity in Harlem in general and apartment buildings in particular.

Sex Work and the Moral Panic before Prohibition From the turn of the twentieth century to the passing of the Volstead Act in 1920, black leaders and reformers tried to purge vice activity from their

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beloved Harlem. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black Manhattan was rife with prostitution and criminal activity. Vice thrived in black areas primarily because blacks’ residential options were often limited to areas in notorious red-light districts. According to historian Chad Heap, native-born whites believed that red-light districts could be controlled through spatial confinement to select neighborhoods, and presumed that these districts should house blacks and some immigrant groups who they believed were inherently disposed to criminality. In the 1880s and 1890s, for example, after Italians pushed blacks out of the area between Thompson and Third Streets on the Lower East Side, one of the few areas that blacks found housing was in the Tenderloin, already the most famous sex district in the city.8 At the tail end of the century, day and night, black women frolicked with men, without regard to race, in the streets along West Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Seventh Streets between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and by the early 1900s, black women were known to sing solicitous ditties on the streets of the West Thirties and Forties.9 Sex workers also marketed sex for sale in black resorts and clubs that served both white and black clientele, such as Barron Wilkins’s Café, Diggs’s Place, William Banks’s Keystone Café, and Edmund’s Theatrical (or Douglas) Club, Allen’s Café, and the Marshall Hotel.10 In the first decade of the twentieth century, a number of factors contributed to the rise of black prostitution in Harlem. First, in the late nineteenth century, as white reformers became concerned about “white slavery” and “fallen” women, they initiated an anti-vice movement to save white women and close brothels. This resulted in a reduction of prostitution-ridden hotels and brothels and of solicitation on the streets in the Tenderloin. By the eve of the Great War, anti-vice reformer Raymond Fosdick stated, “I am speaking without exaggeration when I say that for a city of its size” New York was “the cleanest city in the world.”11 Rather than going away, however, prostitution scattered and relocated to small-scale working-class commercial and residential spaces across the city, including Harlem. Second, the relocation of prostitution overlapped with the movement of black leisure resorts from the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill to Harlem. In Harlem, prostitutes established agreements with candy stores, cigar stores, and other businesses and worked in the black district’s tenements, furnished room houses, and buffet flats. This expansion of black Manhattan’s sexual and leisure geography to Harlem triggered a black anti-vice campaign to rid Harlem of prostitution both in the streets and in the apartment buildings.12 Black and white reformers coupled the preponderance of lodgers in black residences with an increase in prostitution in tenement buildings. Since the late nineteenth century, social reformers claimed that lodgers contributed to

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the spread of immorality and vice activity in tenement buildings. In 1901, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois opined that problems in the black community would be reduced by the “separation of the decent and vicious elements, which the lodging system and high rent bring in such fatal proximity.”13 Very little changed before the Great War. In his 1912 survey of The Negro at Work in New York City, black sociologist George E. Haynes lamented that the “lodger evil” caused “both physical and moral disease” to the black family.14 Early in the second decade of the century, the incessant flow of unmarried black women migrating to the city and settling into black districts troubled many white and black reformers, who feared that single women would harm the black family structure. Giving, perhaps, undue attention to single women, many of these reformers claimed that they preyed upon seemingly innocent and naïve black men—single and married. The so-called lodger evil compounded these matters, especially when single women were lodgers. In 1911, in Half a Man, white reformer Mary White Ovington complained that “in their hours of leisure the surplus women are known to play havoc with their neighbors’ sons, even with their neighbors’ husbands.” Ovington also worried about the effects of surplus women on black masculinity, noting that “Colored men in New York command their ‘mark,’ and girls are found who keep them in polished boots, fashionable coats, and well-creased trousers.”15 Similarly, black leaders, such as Du Bois, also believed that these black women might threaten the ever-elusive black patriarchal household.16 Black parents and elders were also concerned about their daughters, nieces, and granddaughters. With considerable freedom, as well as an assortment of options for entertainment and employment in Harlem, young black women might sully their parents’ reputation and more often, challenge their parents’ ability to control their behavior. In this way, as historian Kevin Gaines notes, “urban pathology was traced to sexual misconduct.”17 The widespread presence of prostitution in black Manhattan and buffet flats in Harlem tenement buildings corroborated black reformers’ consternation about the large number of lodgers. In 1909, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and the police drove prostitution from the church’s environs. Powell triumphantly stated, “there was not enough room [on] 40th Street both for our church and the houses of prostitution.”18 He asked the police to “give those who are conducting places of prostitution in our church block thirty days in which to cease their nefarious traffic or get out.”19 Powell’s actions were both moral and political. As a pillar of the community, his cooperation with the police demonstrated the black community’s respect for the law and warned the black community that criminals would be reported and arrested. Following Powell’s success with ridding

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40th Street of streetwalkers, the Age stated, “You ministers should now strike at social prostitution as carried on by church members in their homes and buffet flats.”20 The weekly directed the ministers’ attention to Harlem. An employee of the Age explained, “I will give you the addresses of a dozen buffet flats in Harlem.”21 Concerned about the moral character of the burgeoning black community, the New York Age aggressively targeted vice activity in Harlem. In 1910, the black weekly stated that “every leader and influential man and woman in the race in New York City should do all they can to rid their communities of their loafing and bad characters.” Although the Age included all black communities, it seemed especially concerned about Harlem. While not mentioning Harlem explicitly, the Age noted that “immoral people are rapidly moving into the flats and tenements and they should be driven out by whatever means necessary.”22 So in the midst of the migration from lower Manhattan to Harlem, the New York Age initiated a “Clean ’Em Out” campaign in 1911. The black weekly argued that the city needed a “moral cleansing.” Prostitution, as the Age lamented, sullied the reputation of all black districts. The New York Age hoped to initiate “a moral awakening,” declaring “we purpose to do what we can in our way to arouse the people.” Thus, according to the weekly, “street-walking women and the animals that live upon their dirty money and boldly loaf in the path of good people, must go.”23 For, “Harlem is worth fighting for. It deserves the jealous protection of all good men.”24 Still, in the middle of the real estate war for Harlem, the Age was disturbed about the moral character of people moving into Harlem apartments. While prostitution operated both on the streets and in the apartment buildings, illicit and immoral behavior, especially prostitution, also contaminated the black community in myriad ways. Prostitution spread sexually transmitted diseases as well as display undesirable representations of gender practices of both women and men in public for all to see. Black men in the trade marred public representations of black manhood, as they profited from the exploitation of black women. Black women exchanging sex for payment defiled and threatened the health of the race and the integrity of black womanhood, as they transgressed the boundaries of male gendered space. As dispatches reporting the spread of prostitution circulated, the preponderance of the trade in Harlem apartment houses especially vexed black leaders.25 The New York Age, and by association black entrepreneurs, also explained the growth of prostitution and especially of buffet flats as the result of whiteowned saloons and barrelhouses. Throughout the spring of 1916, the Age investigated black and white business activity in Harlem and found that whites controlled Harlem’s businesses sector and received greater patronage from

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blacks than black proprietors. In this context, the Age framed black-owned cabarets and saloons as paragons of uprightness and white-owned leisure places as dens of debauchery. White-owned barrelhouses availed their “back rooms” to black women “to go whether they have an escort or not,” although the law forbade women from frequenting public bars.26 The Age reported “that some of the [white] saloonmen seem to have an understanding with certain of the women frequenters of their saloon, this understanding embodying an evident agreement that the women in question will bring to a particular saloon all the customers it is possible for them to control.”27 Furthermore, the Age claimed, the “wholesaler supplies the ‘buffet flat,’ taking down the lion share of the profits.”28 The black weekly claimed that the relationship began as the “landlady,” the manager of the buffet flat, supplied liquor to transients. As her clientele expanded, the landlady could not afford to supply her customers, so the “smooth-tongued” white wholesaler gave her credit, eventually becoming a silent partner.29 Black sex workers and wouldbe landladies facilitated this arrangement through the use of telephone orders and messengers for home delivery.30 The Age explained emerging forms of urban prostitution in the advent of the anti-brothel and prostitution campaigns in the early twentieth century. As sex workers fled the Tenderloin and other vice-ridden areas, they established agreements with leisure providers so that prostitution in places of public amusement coexisted with and fed off of residentially based prostitution. To save black womanhood and Harlem from debauchery, the Age asserted that Harlemites needed to show greater racial loyalty. The white saloonkeeper had “no racial sympathy with the Negro and it matters little to him as to what the race women do, except as he is able to exploit them for his financial interest.” In the black saloons and cabarets, on the other hand, there was a “noticeable absence of the ‘hanger-on’ of the female breed, who, by toleration or encouragement of the proprietor, would ply with the unwary male as her victim.”31 The black-run saloons, unlike white saloons, proposed the Age, either followed or were prepared to faithfully abide the law. The Age also promised to save black men from aggressive black women. Employing language that mirrored Du Bois’s, Miller’s, and Ovington’s depiction of single black women in the urban North, the Age characterized them as seductive sirens spellbinding guileless black men. Consequently, Harlemites were exhorted to patronize black leisure places not only because doing so would uplift the race economically but also because they were respectably managed enterprises that catered to respectable black men and women. Thus, in order to raise the moral rectitude of Harlem and rid the black district of buffet flats, blacks,

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the Age advanced, must shut down white-owned saloons and patronize black leisure places.32 Black and white reformers joined black journalists and the religious community in eradicating illicit activity from Harlem. The dearth of resources and the desire to turn over their efforts to the city prompted the National League for Urban Conditions Among Negroes (NLUCAN) to cooperate and share their information, personnel, and programming with various social agencies in New York City. The NLUCAN collaborated with the Committee of Fourteen (COF), a citizens’ association founded in 1905 to eradicate vice and prostitution in New York City. Since the pre–World War I migration, the committee was consumed with the unseemly escalation of sexual relations between black men and white women within saloons and hotels across the city. As historian Jennifer Fronc argues, “race mixing emerged as the most easily identifiable marker of disorderliness.” During the period from 1911 to 1913, the relationship between the black community and the committee was freighted with conflict, especially insofar as the committee tried to impose “segregation in a state with strong antidiscrimination laws.” Interracial sexuality, therefore, was already the subtext for anti-vice activism, prior to the Great War in Harlem and in other black districts; during this early period, then, the committee’s operations regarding prostitution were always interspersed with concerns about black and white sexual relations.33 In 1914, Frederick H. Whitin, general secretary of the Committee of Fourteen, explained “that one of the acute problems at the Night Court to my mind was that of the colored woman arraigned on the charge of prostitution.” Whitin was troubled by the disproportionate representation of black women charged with prostitution in New York City. Although black women comprised less than 10 percent of the female population, the police charged thirty out of the eighty-seven women with tenement house prostitution. Whitin believed that the “clearing up of Broadway and 6th Avenue” that led to “more business coming to the colored women.”34 Whitin also noted that there was a decrease in soliciting and loitering in the streets, but an increase in arrest cases of prostitution in tenement buildings. In the past, plainclothes officers arrested women on the streets, but now they deferred the arrests “until they ha[d] accompanied the woman to a tenement.”35 This indicated the general shift of prostitution from brothels and hotels to small-scale working-class commercial and residential spaces.36 With neither the resources nor the political sway to open up affordable apartment buildings to blacks, the NLUCAN tried to address housing and prostitution by framing vice in general and prostitution in particular as an

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urban problem. The league understood that prostitution, excessive lodgers, and housing congestion constituted different but interrelated elements of urbanization. The confluence of these elements, particularly the large number of single women, created a moral panic among black and white reformers.37 The NLUCAN cooperated with police, municipal agencies, and various antivice agencies to gather information on vice activity and to arrest perpetrators. The league’s report, Housing Conditions among Negroes in Harlem, New York City (1915), highlighted that 58 percent of 1,002 apartments included lodgers, with the largest category including man, wife, and lodgers, and the second largest category including man, wife, children, and lodgers.38 Using the COF’s statistics in the report, the league contended that the lodger contributed to the spread of prostitution in apartment buildings. The report stated, “the court record of tenement house violations shows a disproportionate percentage of colored women, who no doubt started in their sordid traffic through the unwholesome contact with the irresponsible lodger.”39 But the league also tethered the upswing in prostitution arrests in apartments to factors outside the control of the black community. These included the blatant targeting of black women by the police. The league reported an incident wherein a police officer brutalized a seventeen-year—old black girl, claiming “he had to use his night stick in arresting her.” The young woman “had a lump on the back of her neck as large as one’s fist: blood from the wound covered her clothing.” Although the magistrate released the girl, the officer was not censured. The exorbitant rents black tenants regularly paid and the low paying jobs available to most black women and the black community also tied housing to prostitution. The league contended that racism in housing and employment placed black tenants, regardless of their character, in vulnerable positions. In detailing, for example, how “respectable widows with children tolerat[ed] prostitution rather than . . . dispossess those guilty and face the large rent alone while looking for more desirable lodgers,” the league highlighted the complicated circumstances black families, especially black women, endured due to residential segregation. Notwithstanding acknowledgment of these structural factors, however, the Urban League enlisted the aid of the city’s reform agencies and the police in order to reinforce Harlem’s respectability. So although the presence of the lodgers was “purely economic,” the league marked them as a threat to “the morals of the family life.”40 The Urban League immediately cooperated with the police and other agencies to encourage tenant responsibility as well as to forge a proper housing environment. Its Housing Bureau formed a list of respectable apartments, notifying the Tenement House, Board of Health, and the police departments when tenants reported housing violations, and held public meetings “de-

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signed to educate the people of the community in the rights and duties of landlords and tenants.”41 The league conferred with the City and Suburban Homes Company about taking over certain apartments at low rent rates, as well as “managing them as to eliminate undesirable tenants.”42 Through cooperation with the COF, the Urban League hired a probation officer to handle cases involving black women who appeared before in court, and in June 1915, unsuccessfully tried to establish a home for “delinquent women.”43 This preProhibition black reform movement represented its broad agenda as one that would address vice activity, the lodger evil, and the problem of multi-class housing dwellings simultaneously. These early responses of the black community also highlight the ways that gender and the politics of respectability shaped community politics, as blacks’ anxieties about the upsurge of prostitution first in the streets and saloons and then in apartment buildings prompted the league to work with the police, despite their misgivings about the police’s abusive treatment of black women. Because of its broad social and political objectives, the NLUCAN could not address vice activity in Harlem by itself; but by framing these various interrelated issues as problems of urbanization, the NLUCAN could solicit the resources of the COF, the police department, public and private social agencies, and Harlemites themselves to attend to the larger goals of the black community.44

“What a Lot of ‘Fays!’”: The Negro Mecca under Siege in Prohibition-Era Harlem Despite the passing of the National Prohibition Act in 1919, prohibiting the production, sale, and transportation of alcohol, the dry movement in New York City struggled to suppress the widespread use of alcohol in the city’s commercialized resorts. The dry movement incited a countermovement peopled with a diverse cadre of Italian, Jewish, and Irish immigrants, “cosmopolitan” and “sophisticated” members of the upper class, and even recalcitrant city officials, who were convinced that Prohibition was discordant with the democratic and liberal ethos of the city. According to historian Michael Lerner, jazz music, mixed leisure places, and the spirits flowing openly in the city’s many speakeasies, dancehalls, and buffet flats enhanced what was already happening.45 In Harlem, Prohibition meant the expansion of white control over commercial entertainment. Virtually overnight, whites, many of them Italian and Jewish gangsters, opened cabarets, speakeasies, and nightclubs. They effectively tapped into Harlem’s vast talent pool, and with a monopoly on the bootlegging trade, they paid black performers better wages than black

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establishments. Prohibition, opined writer Claude McKay, “crippled” blackowned resorts in Harlem. While some black-owned cabarets prospered, most were not competitive. In 1923, the COF hired a black investigator to study the spread of vice activity in Harlem. The investigator counted thirteen cabarets in Harlem, with only three catering exclusively to black patrons. Four years later, a New York Amsterdam News’s columnist, Edgar M. Grey, investigated the district’s nightclubs and found eighteen clubs, and of the thirty-one managers and owners, only seven were black and residents of Harlem; the remainder of them were Italians and Jews. Moreover, only one of the clubs was on property controlled by a black realtor.46 Similarly, according to the Committee of Fourteen’s 1928 study, of eighty-five speakeasies, whites owned and managed approximately 90 percent; 5 percent were owned by whites and managed by blacks; and 5 percent were owned and managed by blacks.47 Although Prohibition represented a continuation of white control, it also provided new employment opportunities for Harlemites willing and able to work in the district’s resorts. Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, the majority of blacks toiled at the lowest rung of the labor market, and despite the work of black protest organizations, their efforts fell short of providing blacks remunerative employment. Harlem’s nightlife boom in the twenties meant more and sometimes better paying jobs for blacks than could be found in the formal economy. As Lerner explains, “African Americans in New York looked to the illegal liquor trade during Prohibition, as well as to employment in Harlem’s nightclubs and speakeasies, as important sources of economic opportunity.” The expansion of commercial entertainment offered employment opportunities not only for musicians, dancers, singers, and actors, but also hostesses, waiters, and chefs. According to journalist Floyd Snelson, a contemporary, “thousands of dollars nightly found their way into the black belt.”48 The influx of white proprietors and patrons transformed the leisure geography of Harlem in the 1920s. As whites reclaimed Harlem real estate for entertainment purposes, they catered to the tastes of white customers, and in some cases excluded black patrons. Thus, with the extension of white control and the expansion of the market of white consumers, nightclub and cabaret proprietors reoriented commercial entertainment in Harlem for whites who resided outside of the black district. Attracted by black artists, musicians, and the district’s vibrant nightlife, whites fled to Harlem to escape “the old-fashioned gatherings organized by society’s self-declared leaders,” explains literary critic Ann Douglas. The Negro Mecca’s nightclubs, speakeasies, and dancehalls became a refuge for slumming whites to break away from Victorian mores and to live out their desire for the exotic and “uninhibited”

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ways of black folk.49 In going to Harlem, whites took “a trip from their white world into another mysterious dark world,” noted Howard “Stretch” Johnson, a former Cotton Club dancer. Places like the Cotton Club, which wholly prohibited black patronage, reconfigured and reimagined these urban establishments into utopian plantations serving white desire reminiscent of the antebellum South. Johnson described the performances as “cloaked in primitive and exotic garb. They were top-flight performances designed to appease the appetite for a certain type of black performance, the smiling black, the shuffling black, the black-faced black, the minstrel, coon-show atmosphere which existed.” Just as the white literary and affluent classes sought and found primitivism in black literature, they also desired and found the same at the cabaret and the nightclub.50 The presence and sway that whites held in Harlem challenged the black community’s proprietary claims to Harlem by the mid-twenties.51 In Prohibition-era New York, Harlem establishments catering to white patrons did “so well,” journalist Chase recalled, “there was no place for local Negroes at all.”52 In 1927, when writer Rudolph Fisher came back to Harlem after being away for five years attending medical school, he was “entirely unprepared for what [he] found.” Fisher “drew a deep breath and looked about, seeking familiar faces,” and thought, “‘What a lot of ‘fays!’” Feeling like a stranger in his own community, he felt as though he had lost something that formerly belonged to him. He lamented that “the complexion of the place is theirs, not mine. I? Why, I am actually stared at, I frequently feel uncomfortable and out of place, and when I go out on the floor to dance I am lost in a sea of white faces.”53 The presence of whites and their expectations and appetite for primitivism offended many blacks. As Langston Hughes opined acerbically, “Harlem Negroes did not like [to be] . . . stare[d] at—like amusing animals in a zoo.” Within their own neighborhood, where they had been relatively safe from the white gaze, black humanity was recalibrated to whites’ perceptions of black inferiority. Their privileged position as black patrons paled in the face of the exploitable market and tastes of wealthier white consumers. According to writer and editor Wallace Thurman, “should the white patronage be suddenly discontinued hardly three of them [nightclubs] could remain open.” Fisher confirms this. Managers, he claimed, “don’t hesitate to say that it is upon these predominant white patrons that they depend for success.”54 Writing of Harlem of yesteryear, Fisher remembered the “real Negro cabarets” as irresistible. Indeed, in Fisher’s article “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” readers get a glimpse of the variety of cabarets available to blacks, as well as the range of social classes within the community attending them. Fritiz Pollard, All American half-back, Paul Robeson, and Bert Williams could be

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found at Hayne’s Café, later named the Oriental. According to Fisher, “the people you saw at church in the morning you met at the Lybia [cabaret] at night.” Many blacks, Fisher suggests, understood their religious life and commercial entertainment as related parts of the whole of their Harlem experience. In so doing, blacks’ sense of community extended to and reinforced both arenas. Through blacks’ social interactions and exchanges in multiple spaces, they established a deep sense of familiarity with people and places across black ethnicities and class. As Fisher reminded readers, at Edmonds’s, one of the seedy cabarets in Harlem, Ethel Waters performed regularly and was “known simply as Ethel.”55 Fisher’s experience highlights black Harlemites’ fleeting feelings of autonomy but also their distaste for being exoticized by whites in their own neighborhood. Prohibition created a crisis for black patrons in their Negro Mecca. Although whites had always controlled the district’s leisure institutions, they had until then catered to black patrons since they made up the majority of the consumer market. Thus, as consumers, blacks held a proprietary claim upon Harlem—consumption, therefore, operated as a surrogate for economic and cultural autonomy. But in the Prohibition era, with the expansion of white establishments and whites crowding black leisure spaces, the Negro Mecca became a chimera not only to black proprietors, but also to black patrons.

Privacy, Residential Prostitution, and the Underground Economy Residential-based leisure during the 1920s provided alternative commercial recreation for blacks seeking to participate in Harlem’s leisure and sexual culture. The Great Migration, the economic circumstance of blacks in the postwar era, and Prohibition played pivotal roles in spurring the expansion of residential-based leisure institutions. First, the growth and expansion of the black community and the high population density in the district’s residential space offered blacks a semblance of privacy to engage in commercialized nighttime amusements. Second, the expansion of white control over public amusements and the reinvention of these formally black spaces to cater to the tastes of whites both reconfigured and extended Harlem’s leisure geography. Although many blacks felt that the throng of whites diluted and diminished Harlem’s cultural life, some continued to frequent the district’s cabarets, speakeasies, and nightclubs. For many blacks, however, the quality of the music and the possibilities for privacy and congregation had lessened, often making the ambience of these establishments no longer inviting. So while buffet flats and other forms of residential-based leisure existed before the twenties, they played a more significant role for black patrons and

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entrepreneurs during the Prohibition era and, in different ways, offered alternative opportunities to regain a semblance of economic, sexual, and cultural autonomy.56 Buffet flats and other forms of residential-based prostitution reflected the spread and profitability of prostitution and the economic insecurity of the black community, particularly the limited job options for black women in the formal economy in the 1920s. If the employment situation was bad for black men, it was worse for black women. Discrimination in the job market, along with high rents and low wages in the formal economy made it incredibly difficult for black families. Black women, therefore, whether married or single, worked to support their families and themselves. Additionally, black women’s gains in the industrial labor force were temporary. As chapter 2 illustrates, the proportion of black women in that sector declined in the twenties. These economic conditions often made participation in criminal activity and leisure work in vice districts a necessary, though precarious, alternative. Few black women could survive on the wages from the menial jobs available to them, prompting many to labor in and outside the fringes of the criminal economy.57 Prostitution and leisure work offered black women remuneration and some measure of autonomy. Many black women chose the material wealth and the control over their labor that prostitution afforded rather than toiling as domestics. Throughout the twenties, when domestics earned approximately eighteen dollars per week, a sex worker could earn that amount in one day of work.58 The entertainment industry, for many black women, was their entryway into the prostitution trade.59 Through this trade, they were able to supplement infrequent work in entertainment; it also afforded ambitious performers time to take lessons and to audition for theater and cabaret jobs. As the fulcrum of American theater and music, New York City attracted thousands of starry-eyed black women hoping to land a part on Broadway or even to become the next Ethel Waters or Florence Mills. As musicologist Daphne D. Harrison explains, “Young black women were often so dazzled by the opportunity for freedom, fortunes, and fame offered by the stage that they were willing to accept questionable living and working conditions to achieve them.”60 According to the COF’s 1928 report, a majority of the sex workers started as singers and dancers in cabarets, while others entered sex work through employment as a “hostess-entertainer-waitress” in nightclubs. In March 1928, for example, at Foot Lights Club, at 115 West 131st, Sheila explained to a COF undercover agent that she “had been in a revue at Barron’s Cabaret and at another time been in a hostess in Atlantic City.”61At the Green Leaf Melody Club, when a COF agent asked Doris Jones her where-

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abouts after work for a future “party,” she exclaimed, “It is difficult to find me, because I am each day rehearsing for a show and we open in Newark next week.”62 While limited job opportunities and career aspirations motivated some black women to become sex workers, economic circumstances affecting the family induced many others. When the household’s income shifted from two breadwinners to one, supplemental jobs in the informal economy were critical to black families’ survival. According to a 1928 report by the COF, men abandoned the family, and in some cases, women deserted their spouses because of “cruelty or ‘trifleness’ and non-support.” The “cruelty” that the COF report accounts is suggestive of the verbal and physical abuse that many black women endured at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends.63 Thus, black women engaged in prostitution for multiple and complex reasons, which had to do with their limited life chances in a racist political economy and the way that economic racism shaped the exigencies of their family and home life. During the 1920s, buffet flats and other forms of residential-based prostitution created an expansive web of vice activity dispersed throughout Harlem. Housing congestion, subdivided apartments, and high numbers of lodgers provided a considerable degree of privacy for prostitution in residential buildings. With the protection of residential buildings, blacks could establish prostitution anywhere throughout the black district. Privacy created economic opportunities for enterprising blacks, especially women, willing to use their homes or rented residential spaces for prostitution. While buffet flats generally provided a variety of delights, including gambling, drinking, and dancing for patrons, commercialized sex was the main attraction. Boardinghouses, furnished rooming houses, and houses of assignation, where rooms were rented by the hour, also served the flourishing residential-based prostitution trade in Harlem. Regardless of how proprietors used residential spaces, privacy allowed blacks to use rented spaces in a variety of ways for profit and pleasure. The privacy of the apartments alone could not prevent police and the COF from finding vice activity in Harlem apartment buildings. Managers of buffet flats and speakeasies therefore devised a medley of deceptions to disguise their illegal enterprises from white onlookers, the COF, the NYUL, and the police department. Sex workers, landladies, pimps, and others rarely took residential privacy for granted. During the early twenties, the COF, as historian Stephen Robertson has shown, tried unsuccessfully to suppress the rapid upswing of prostitution in Harlem and admitted in 1923 that it had “lost the ‘degree of control’ over Harlem that it had achieved in the previous decade.”64 Yet as investigations of apartment buildings in Harlem increased, madams,

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pimps, sex workers, and go-betweens distributed business cards to prospective johns in order to circumvent police surveillance and COF undercover agents. According to black journalist Roi Ottley, “only colored people were handed these ‘invitations,’ for during Prohibition any white face might be that of an enforcing agent; and moreover, the local police appeared more diligent in raiding these places.’” Operators of these establishments also interrogated potential patrons before they entered the premises. For example, when a COF agent entered apartment 7W at 142 West 131st Street, he “mentioned Nathan Griffen and Steve (GBs [go-betweens]) and also presented a card and was admitted.” The agent explained that Marshall, the manager, asked him “how I happened to get his card and after I explained to him how I happened to know his place he said ‘You are all right. You could get anything you want. Do you want a drink?’” The ubiquitous presence of whites in Harlem, the complaints of Harlem tenants, and the police’s proclivity to over-police blacks always made residential-based leisure porous to the surveillance of the NYUL, the police department, and the COF’s undercover agents.65 Some women operated buffet flats out of their own apartments. Darlene Johnson, for example, a black woman who lived in an apartment at 40 West 131st, managed a group of women who were on call for patrons. Since she lived alone rather than with her “many good looking girls,” Johnson was unlikely to attract the attention of police, undercover agents, and other authorities. Furthermore, since she operated primarily on the weekends, Johnson might have worked during the weekdays in the formal economy.66 Operating out of her place, Johnson had greater control over her body and the circumstances of the sexual exchange. Regardless, on April 14, 1928, at approximately 2 a.m., she opened her door to Raymond Claymes, a black investigator, and three black men. She served them drinks, and after Claymes asked her if she had girls coming in, she explained that she was alone but that they should return “earlier on Friday and Saturday.” When Claymes asked her about “the price for having some fun with a girl,” Johnson explained that it depended on the girl, but that the room would cost him two dollars. When asked by the investigator if she was available for sex, she explained, “Oh, I prefer to talk business when we get ready to do business.” According to the investigator, she would not “name a price definitely,” because she preferred “to get a fellow excited” to coax him to pay a higher price. Whether she derived pleasure or feigned it, Johnson used her own residential space, body, sexuality, and entrepreneurial skills to exact as much from johns as possible.67 Like Johnson, another black landlady named Felicia James operated out of her basement apartment at 138 West 133rd Street, though hers was not a call flat. Instead, James engaged in a much more casual form of prostitution that provided rooms for rent, but did

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not manage a group of girls. As she noted, “there are several girls who come in from time to time, but usually bring their own with them.” James offered her own services for “a nickel”—that is, five dollars—rather than seducing patrons like Johnson. Both cases demonstrate the economic opportunities for prostitution that residential privacy provided black women, as well as the multiple ways they used residential space to suit their respective situations.68 As an integral part of the underground economy, residential-based prostitution also extended to and occupied spaces within Harlem’s formal economy, as the New York Age asserted in 1916. Taxi-drivers, porters, and doormen participated in the underground economy as “go-betweens of vice,” operatives who earned money on the side by connecting prospective customers with sex workers. Black women working as leisure workers also played an important role in bridging the legal and illicit economies. As leisure workers in nightclubs, cafes, and cabarets, black women were used by managers to solicit and entice would-be patrons. In early July 1928, for example, a COF undercover investigator flirted with a black hostess named Amy Monroe at the Green Leaf Melody Club. While dancing with her, he said, “I imagine you must be very sweet to have and love,” and she asked him if he wanted to find out. She explained that if in fact he did, they could use the manager’s apartment, which was above the club and that his wife “was at home and would receive us.” Monroe’s and the manager’s use of the club as a space to solicit johns illuminates how public adult recreation was inextricably bound to prostitution in private residencies, while also underlining attempts to distinguish between licit behavior in the club from illicit behavior in the residence. Creating a visual sexual economy of black women’s bodies, white managers marketed them as sexual objects for the viewing and later for the taking. In response to the investigator’s inquiry about engaging in sex at the club itself, Monroe plainly retorted, “No, I am one of the hostesses here and no such act is committed on the premises.” Yet even as they discussed the potential for sexual intercourse, Monroe insisted on the propriety of her job and the club. Working on the fringes of both the underground and legal economies, Monroe was still responsible to the manager in both places of work, at the club and his apartment, in ways that spotlight how black women’s bodies were disciplined and kept under surveillance even within residential spaces. In Prohibition-era Harlem, resort owners tried to mask traces of unlawful behavior that might be connected to residential-based prostitution in order to protect the privacy of such residential-based prostitution. This privacy allowed blacks to engage in the informal economy and provided a means to complement and supplement their incomes. Yet these

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entrepreneurial responses were defensive postures to both white hegemony in Harlem and inadequate opportunities in the formal economy. Rent parties, however, offered other forms of amusements. Rather than being spaces to engage in a range of sexual activities, rent parties primarily offered blacks opportunities for congregation.

“Shake It in the Morning”: Rent Parties and the Remaking of Congregation The origins of rent parties lay in the South, where blacks gave parties to “pay the installment on the Steinway piano, or the weekly rent.” According to Ira De Reid, all that was required to throw such a party was a good piano player and a few girls. Willie “The Lion” Smith, one of the originators of Harlem stride piano, however, claimed that rent parties were a secular form of parlor socials given by churches to raise money to pay for the preacher. Whatever their origins, in Harlem high rents and low wages made paying for housing a challenge and leasing rooms to lodgers was common but still inadequate. Harlemites used their apartments and houses as spaces for commercialized recreation and economic remuneration.69 Rent parties thereby became a way for blacks to reclaim Harlem as their own. In the 1920s, rent parties became a cultural and economic institution of sociability in Harlem and other urban neighborhoods across black America. Like buffet flats and other forms of apartment-based leisure, these shindigs offered blacks a measure of privacy from the gaze of whites, respectable blacks, and authorities. Rent parties helped tenants pay rent, piano players sharpen their skills, and migrants rekindle old friendships as well as make new ones. As journalist Bill Chase notes, “they were a definite ‘must’ for those who got their ‘kicks’ from ‘gutbucket’ music, reefers, chitterlings, home brew and good, old-stomachdestroying bathtub gin.”7 Party operators’ economic circumstances initially determined the frequency of the rent parties. As the black population grew, housing congestion worsened, and whites commandeered black leisure places, house rent parties became an entrepreneurial opportunity and a cultural novelty. As Duke Ellington opined, “Owing the rent is . . . more a case for rejoicing than for despair, and is as much an excuse for a party as it is a means of raising money. It really is a source of income as pleasant as it is a novel.”71 Party-givers distributed invitations in the streets, in bars, barbershops, beauty parlors, in mailboxes, and on apartment elevators. They printed cards advertising music, dancing, and the headlining piano player:

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Hey! Hey! Come on boys and girls let’s shake that Thing Where? At Hot Poppa Sam’s West 134th Street, three flights up. Jelly Roll Smith at the piano Saturday Night . . . Hey! Hey! Fall in line, and watch your step, For there’ll be Lots of Browns with Plenty of Pep at A Social Whist Party. Refreshments just it. Music won’t quit. Shake it in the morning. Shake it at night At a Social Matinee Party . . . Music too tight. Refreshments just right.72

Besides offering poker and dice games, fried fish, chicken, corn bread, rice and beans, chitterlings, potato salad, and pigs’ feet, house rent parties created opportunities for migrants to find companionship. As Thurman explains, “there are in Harlem thousands of people with no place to go, thousands of lonesome, unattached and cramped, who stroll the streets eager for a chance to form momentary contacts, to dance, to drink, and make merry.”73 Thus, given the public nature of these invitations, they not only informed Harlemites already in the know but also alerted black newcomers, visitors from out of town and black migrants new to the district. A large proportion of Harlem’s population over the age of fifteen was either single or widowed. In 1930, 37 percent (32,155) of black men were single and 4.2 percent (3,652) were widowers. In the same year, 27 percent of black women were single (25,500) and 15.5 percent (14,626) were widowed.74 At rent parties, Harlemites found good food, jazz, and blues, but these sites also operated as “meeting places for those who couldn’t afford more expensive public places.” In this sense, rent parties provided spaces for blacks unwilling or unable to patronize the highpriced clubs pandering to whites. As historian Jervis Anderson concludes, “some could not afford—and, in any event, would not have been let into—the classier Harlem night spots.”75 Harlem apartments also created conditions for black women to enjoy entertainment on their own terms. Describing a neighborhood speakeasy, Thur-

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man remarked that “the women, like men, swear, drink and dance as much and as vulgarly as they please. Yet they do not strike the observer as being vulgar.”76 Black women reclaimed control of their bodies for pleasure. Speakeasies, rent parties, and other housing leisure spaces enabled black women to transcend the rhetorical and physical constraints placed upon them by their employers, respectable blacks, and the church. As wage earners, black women had greater access to nighttime leisure activities. In Harlem, as well as in black districts in Chicago and other black metropolises, they obtained more “independence from familial and domestic control with each paycheck they cashed” than in the South, especially the rural areas.77 Black women had the independence to consume what they wanted and enjoy their leisure time as they pleased. As Naomi Washington, Fats Waller’s sister, explained, “I loved to play poker and blackjack. I’ve come home on many a morning at four or five o’clock, just in time to get a bath and go to work.”78 Like other Harlem adult recreations, rent parties were also a training ground for local jazz musicians, especially those playing a faster style of ragtime, known as “Harlem stride piano.” The rent party offered serious piano players a chance to hone their skills, to prove themselves in piano playing contests, called “shouts” or “jumps,” and to make a little money on the side. James P. Johnson, the best stride pianist, mentored some of the most famous jazz pianists, such as Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Harlem’s Thomas “Fats” Wright Waller.79 Johnson was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1891, and as a teenager, his family moved to West Sixty-Third Street in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill district. In 1920, Russell Brooks, the brother of Waller’s classmate, introduced Waller to Johnson. Waller was born 1904, and raised in the San Juan Hill district and Harlem. Johnson immediately began teaching the stride piano style to Waller, who practically moved in with the Johnsons. Johnson’s wife reminisces, “Fats was seventeen, and we lived on 140th Street, and Fats would bang on our piano till all hours of the night. . . . I would say to him, ‘Now go on home, or haven’t you got a home?’”80 Johnson was responsible for getting Waller his first gig at a rent party by introducing him to Raymond “Lippy” Boyette, who booked many musicians for house parties in Harlem. With the help of Johnson’s tutorship, Waller blossomed. Since rent parties tended to last until the early morning, the partygiver hired several pianists for the affair. As one pianist began to tire, another sat beside the former, continuing preferably in the same key. This format, which ensured nonstop music, also arranged the musicians in a sequential order for the partygoers and pianists themselves to compare and contrast the pianists’ playing styles and techniques. By the time he played at his first rent party, Waller’s skill had noticeably developed. According to Brooks, among

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the three booked to play the party, Waller “vamp[ed] the same key I had been playin’, F sharp. I was surprised because it was a difficult key. Corky [Williams] and I looked at each other, shocked.” Brooks “turned to Corky and . . . said maybe I should take lessons from James P. I never saw anyone improve so much in such a short time.” The partygoers, of course, decided who won the contests; as the Lion remembered, “there was actually more arguing going on between the listeners than there was jealousy between us [pianists].” Waller’s musical development by way of Johnson’s mentoring highlights the role of rent parties in establishing a musical tradition, where teachers passed on their techniques to students, and where musicians learned from and encouraged each other through competition. Out of these friendly, but intense, shouts, young pianists created a community of musicians and garnered experience as well as local fame, which helped them in their musical careers.81 Through these creative performances, piano players lured people to the parties and kept them on the dance floor. As they did in the black speakeasies and cabarets, party-goers and musicians established a symbiotic connection. The majority of rent parties hired their talent from the neighborhood, but some parties advertised well-known pianists on fliers. The best pianists demonstrated not only great skill but also showmanship. In addition to keyboard dexterity, piano players needed good singing voices, “and a choice repertoire of wise cracks, parodies, shouts and other such tricks of the trade.”82 The pianists set the tone and pace of the party. Pianists controlled the crowd, tapping into its emotional sensibilities and invigorating the partygoers’ sexual instincts. Wallace Thurman explains it best: “The dim lighted room will literally surge with strange rhythms, insinuating and slow, while the dancers, [in] spired by the blue harmonic orgy of the piano keys, will revel in the movements of their bodies.”83 As Thurman described, an effective pianist could enrapture the people at the party, but partygoers also influenced musicians. Through their shared residential, institutional, and cultural life in Harlem, pianist and partygoers nurtured a racial and community consciousness in these apartments. Local pianists established their celebrity at the rent parties. Musicians desired the praise and reverence of the black community. Even within the jazz community, a pianist was not respected “unless, wherever else you appeared, you played the rent-party circuit.”84 Harlemites also inspired the art of many musicians. As Ellington reveals, “my song titles [are] taken from, and naturally principally from, the life of Harlem.” Rent parties engendered a reciprocal influence between musician and Harlemites. “Another custom,” he explains “is the Breakfast Dance which commences about four in the morning and continues until about nine o’clock, with intervals for breakfast. And what a

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time they have! From these impromptu dances taking place solely in Harlem I have derived much inspiration. There are Rent Party Blues, Parlour Social Stomp, and Saturday Nite Function, all of which [song titles] mean more or less the same thing.”85 Like the poets, painters, and novelists of the Harlem Renaissance, Ellington and Waller among others created music that described and signified the pleasures of the urban black experience. Within their own houses and apartments, blacks attempted to regain a semblance of control, a sense of belonging—to recreate congregation. In the Prohibition era, however, congregating in residential spaces represented a loss of power and a defensive response to the horde of whites that claimed places of public amusements that had formerly belonged to blacks.

Policing Commercial and Residential Space in the Prohibition Era The expansion of the district’s sexual and leisure geography in commercialized public and private spaces incited considerable protest and initiated an anti-vice movement in Harlem in the 1920s. This movement, waged by black and white reformers, black journalists, landlords, and black tenants represented the community’s attempts to take back Harlem and remake it as they envisioned it. The seeming omnipresence of vice activity in Harlem engendered both community discussion about the moral fiber of the black district and surveillance of alleged illicit behavior in the streets and in the apartment buildings. As in the period before Prohibition, white ownership of Harlem leisure places, the lodger evil, surplus women, and prostitution were again at the center of this movement. At the same time, however, the New York Urban League and other social reform agencies published surveys and reports documenting high rates of child delinquency, corroborating the concerns of reformers and especially black journalists, alike. But concern over the moral fiber of the black district was only one component of the anti-vice campaign. Beyond challenging Harlem’s respectability, housing-based amusements also disrupted black family life and, for some, made Harlem unlivable and unsafe. In the early twenties, the COF and the NYUL coordinated their efforts and monitored Harlem apartments in search of vice activity. In the winter of 1923, the executive secretary of the COF, Frederick Whitin, requested information from the league about “the bad character and reputation of the tenement house, 546/552 Lenox Avenue.” There had been “eleven arrests from these numbers, which are really one house, between June and September; nine convictions resulted, including two men.” The COF searched for eyewitnesses who “have observed women walking up and down in front of it [the building], soliciting men.”86 Although the expansion of the sexual and

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leisure geography into Harlem apartments triggered this surveillance, the alleged threat of the lodger and of surplus women also consumed reformers, landlords, and even tenants. In 1926, for example, Whitin solicited information from the league concerning the whereabouts of a teenage boy. He explained that “my complainant believes that a young boy is living in the same room with an older woman,” adding that “numerous couples are seen going in and out, for there is direct access to the room in question from the hallway.”87 The boy was identified as being sixteen years old or more; he worked in the evening and slept in the afternoon. According to the report from the COF and the league, the woman was thirty-five years old, married, and living with several couples in the same apartment. The report also suggested that there was a “questionable” relationship between the boy and the woman: “informants say that her husband left her because this boy was getting too much of her attention.”88 Whitin promised James H. Hubert, the executive secretary of the NYUL, to report “these facts to the Police Inspector, with the suggestion that the boy be apprehended as a Wayward Minor.”89 The exchange regarding this particular case stopped at Whitin’s promise to Hubert. For the league and the COF, the case corroborated the claim that the “lodger evil” broke up and sullied black families. But while the case thus focused on activities that roused reformers’ Prohibition-era moral panic, it also underlines how Progressive-era ideas about black criminality, particularly regarding black women, in private spaces were legitimized and circulated among reform agencies. Accordingly, there was no room to interpret the woman’s actions as a sign of good intentions; nor does it allow for the alternative that her husband left because the teenager’s presence challenged the husband’s insecurities about his own masculinity. Rather, this network of reform agencies used fragments of biographical details from complainants, social reformers, and private investigators that locked black women into racist and sexualized archetypes. These fragments and profiles constituted an archive of black criminality, functioning often as the official record of blacks as well as sanctioning the surveillance of black neighborhoods and private spaces in Harlem.90 As the NYUL and the COF tried to curtail unseemly behavior among blacks in Harlem apartment buildings, the growing population of white consumers in Harlem induced reformers to recalibrate their strategy towards prostitution in the black community. The conspicuity of whites especially disturbed the Committee of Fourteen. Before the mid-1920s, the COF’s investigations of Harlem, which depended mainly on white investigators, achieved negligible results. The growth of the black population and the density of the

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housing generally insulated the black community from COF agents. As a black agent plainly described, “congestion . . . greatly increase the difficulty in securing correct information.” By the mid-twenties, New York City guidebooks, news magazines, and fiction, particularly Carl Van Vechten’s novel, Nigger Heaven, published in 1926, broadcasted the glory of Harlem’s nightlife to urbane white society. The COF’s 1926 annual report announced, “it is rumored that there are black and tan places patronized not only by the colored people themselves but also by white customers.”91 In the spring of 1927, the league and the COF reinitiated their discussions about hiring a black investigator. By the spring of 1928, the COF hired Raymond Claymes, a Yale Ph.D. in sociology, to survey Harlem night spots. From March through September of 1928, Claymes canvassed Harlem’s public and tenement night spots. By its 1928 annual report, the COF lamented, “Harlem has become a ‘slumming’ ground for certain classes of whites who are looking for picturesqueness, for ‘thrills’ and, too frequently, for a convenient place in which to go on a moral vacation.” The COF described whites’ behavior and voyage to Harlem as a “moral vacation.” But Claymes also spotlighted widespread crime across the district, implicating the culpability and negligence of the police. In the COF’s 1928 study, Claymes stated that the “total number of violations exceeded the combined reports of the four other investigators” of the committee who canvassed other sections of Manhattan and boroughs of the city. With meager resources and even less political sway, the league and the black community had little recourse to stave off illicit activity. As the COF 1928 report detailed, “the colored areas of Harlem seem to be inadequately policed, and its dance halls, cabarets and other places of amusement practically unsupervised.” The police department’s flagrant disregard for blacks’ civil rights simultaneously facilitated and reinforced criminal activity in Harlem.92 While the league and the COF coordinated their efforts to challenge the rising tide of vice and immoral activity, Harlem’s two black weeklies, the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News weighed in on the expansion of interracial revelry in the black district. On February 4, 1926, in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Police Commissioner McLaughlin discouraged interracial partying in Harlem. McLaughlin “advised members of the National Urban League . . . to try and establish their young people in churches and social organizations.” He also chastised “white visitors who go to Harlem on slumming parties.” They were “trouble makers” and “fools who could think of no better way of spending their money.” To Commissioner McLaughlin, black youth required behavioral reform, but “white visitors,” on the other hand, needed only to change their spending habits. Like the COF, the commissioner aimed to vindicate whites and save them from primitive blacks. The moral turpitude of

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whites’ spending habits, the purchase of liquor and sex—both illegal—did not come under the commissioner’s scrutiny. If blacks had problems, they were mainly economic. Blacks’ activities in these leisure places reflected primarily their economic needs not necessarily their morality; that is, they were no more immoral as leisure workers than whites as consumers of black workers’ performances and services.93 On the other hand, some black journalists did target whites as progenitors and conduits of vice activity in Harlem. In April 1926, the Amsterdam News’s Edgar M. Grey charged that the “presence of these [white-controlled] clubs in the community is a menace to the moral stability of the residents [of Harlem].” Grey and a host of critics blamed the expansion of vice activity on the presence of white patrons and white ownership of Harlem’s nighttime resorts. Well aware of the obstacles blacks faced in the city’s racist labor market, he admitted that these resorts employed Harlem residents, and that various local enterprises, such as restaurants, night barber shops, and tea shops, grew out of the district’s nightlife. In spite of this, Grey asserted, “a vulgar moron must see, if he has half an eye to see, that the present night clubs are a decided moral liability to the community.” For Grey the black community’s morals were held captive to white control. According to Grey, “social writers for more than a generation have asserted that unless a minority group regulates its pleasures, the majority group will sacrifice the morals and virtues of the minority group to the sport and pleasure of the majority group.”94 White ownership exploited black residents and threatened blacks’ autonomy, particularly Harlemites’ capacity to enforce respectability in the black community. Months later, in early July, Grey returned to the issue of white hegemony in Harlem. Grey admitted the necessity of “‘good-time’ institutions.” He claimed that the immoral prerogatives of white proprietors and patrons took advantage of the immaturity of black youth. Committed to “things rather than . . . ideas,” Harlem black youth lost their souls to white capital and white pleasureseekers.95 Black women especially were commodities for white consumption, he lamented. “They [whites] offer the bodies of young women to the largest spender among their white patrons.” In his survey of Harlem leisure resorts, he learned that after white men left the clubs, many of them ventured off to buffet flats that were connected to the white-owned clubs. After watching a white man and black women leave from a resort in a cab, Grey coyly asked the cabdriver, “where he had taken his recent fare.” “Why?” he asked suspiciously. “Are you asleep? Can’t you guess?” Grey admitted that he had no idea, and the cabdriver told him that “he had driven the white man and colored woman to a house on West 143rd Street, which was the regular place where parties made up at this particular club went to finish their evening’s enjoyment.”96

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Blacks’ criticisms of white ownership derived from their belief that white ownership was inherently exploitative and incongruent with the interests of the black community. Grey and others believed that whites engaged in practices “which they would not attempt in their own communities.”97 Consequently, whites tried to hide their illicit behavior in Harlem. As Benito Thomas, a letter writer to the Amsterdam News, countered, “the colored individual has ample cause to regard the boasting of white moral superiority as something worthy to his laughter.”98 Grey’s trenchant appraisal of the white presence in Harlem harkens back to the New York Age’s predictions in 1916 about the detrimental effects of white ownership on the black community and black womanhood. As Grey underscored, many Harlem buffet flats were extensions of white controlled businesses, which included night spots and in-between men, such as cabdrivers and the police officers that facilitated the clubs’ illegal operations. In the Prohibition era, overpowered by whites’ control over commercial real estate and the protection afforded them by public officials, the black community had yielded to white impropriety. As a result, Grey was convinced that, “Harlem is at present nothing more nor less than the devil’s playground; and the toys of the devil’s joys and of his play are the colored residents of Harlem.”99 Thus, rather than prophesizing Harlem’s downfall as the Age had a decade before, Grey claimed that Harlem had already fallen from grace. Fred D. Moore of the Age also directed his gaze upon black public and residential-based amusements. In June of 1926, at the First Emmanuel Church, Independent Christian, at 105 West 130th Street, Moore endorsed Commissioner McLaughlin’s policies, “particularly in dealing with disreputable dance halls.” Richard M. Bolden, chief pastor of the First Emmanuel Church, sent the commissioner a letter of commendation. Describing the disposition of a segment of Harlemites, Moore, the main speaker at the church services, claimed that “much concern has been felt by the negro community . . . in maintaining ‘a high class of respectability’ in negro neighborhoods.” He and other dedicated citizens assembled because Dennis Grice, the superintendent of the “newly remodeled clubrooms of the Independent Order of St. Luke,” requested “dance hall privileges.” The community did not want the hall rented for public dances, according to Moore; he encouraged those present to organize and protest against Grice’s efforts. Moore also warned that, “a growing evil of the negro community has ‘rent parties,’” where “all manner of debauchery was engaged in.” Although rent parties were “hard to attack . . . because of the question of personal liberty,” Moore “urged that such evidence of such affairs be reported to the police.” By juxtaposing rent parties and “high class respectability,” he distinguished rent parties and the dance

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hall as disreputable places, blurring the lines between illicit and licit activities in public and privates places. Although neither rent parties nor Grice’s request was illegal, in encouraging blacks to call the police, Moore framed them as dens of criminality.100 In the mid- to late 1920s, the New York Amsterdam News’s concern about community morals induced the weekly to criticize black parenting. The results of a study of child delinquency by the National Urban League and the Women’s City Club of New York intensified the moral panic.101 The study explained that there was a dearth of institutions and resources available to the black community. In February 1926, the New York Amsterdam News warned readers of “THE ALARMING INCREASE in the number of juvenile delinquents,” adding that it was “one of the most serious problems pressing for a solution today.”102 Blacks needed more “virile young manhood and womanhood than any other racial group in America” since white society “more severely criticized” black people. The black weekly doubted that the younger generation “c[ould] run riot, burn the candle of life at both ends, dissipate its faculties, and creditably acquit itself . . . tomorrow when the future of the race will be in its hands.”103 In the next week’s editorial, the New York Amsterdam News charged that “UNLESS we are willing to concede that some children are born to lives of crime and shame, we must admit that environment and the examples set before them by their elders play a great part in determining the kind of lives they will eventually lead.” Parental delinquency, undoubtedly contributed to juvenile delinquency, contended the New York Amsterdam News. Youths’ behavior in the public reflected their rearing and models of behavior at home. The black weekly earnestly advised black parents that “EXAMPLE, not precept, is the shrine before which the juvenile mind worships.” The New York Amsterdam News emphasized “THERE is very little that goes on in the home that does not make its impression on even a six-year-old child and what it sees it later instinctively tries to imitate.” The black weekly made a plea for parental accountability and the resurrection of healthy households. Acknowledging the black community’s marginal economic circumstances and the uncertainty of any change to their racial plight, the New York Amsterdam News suggested that the future of the race depended upon the efforts of parents and the values they instilled in their children at home; conversely, poor parenting, evidenced by high child delinquency rates, made these young adults ill-equipped to lead the race.104 Harlem tenants and landlords also joined the reform movement to reclaim their households. Tenants, landlords, and civic-minded citizens wrote to the black weeklies, the NYUL, and the COF to curtail vice activity in Harlem apartments. As one tenant charged in the New York Amsterdam News, “Parlor

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socials or rent parties should be eliminated!”105 Rent parties disturbed tenants, besmirched the black community’s reputation, and potentially harmed their children. Undoubtedly, for many tenants the entrenchment of nightly entertainment added to the litany of uncomfortable conditions they endured; in addition to poor housing conditions and high rents, they had to deal with loud noise. One resident living at 2183 Fifth Avenue complained about “disrespectful women and drunken men” lying in the hallways. The resident asserted, “we are afraid to go out—or even let our children go—as we cannot trust their safety.”106 Partygoers were raucous in the halls and played loud music throughout the morning and night. These complaints about the partygoers’ behavior overlapped with, but were distinct from, the morality-based criticisms of reformers and local leaders, like Fred Moore, the editor of the Age. The residents’ complaints derived from their living in the same neighborhoods and apartment buildings where the parties were given and where noise and sporadic violence interrupted their family life and privacy. As a tenant living at 123 West 142nd Street complained, “working people can’t stand it”; “people can’t sleep [with the] singing and dancing all night.”107 Regardless of how they spent their evenings, partygoers and the happenings on the streets intruded upon residents’ domestic life.108 Black weeklies regularly detailed occurrences of violence at these parties. According to the Amsterdam News, “murders and crimes in Harlem for the most part have their origin at parties that are operated weekly to defray expenses for the upkeep of houses.” While this may have been overstated, violence did in fact occur at house parties. In June 1928, for example, Jerry King shot James West with a sawed-off gun at a house party West was throwing in a ground floor apartment. According to West, the party was “jammed and everybody was just having a fine time until 4 a.m. when two of his [West’s] friends began to argue over a girl.” The taller of the two, referred to as Slim, pummeled the shorter one, known as Little Augie. Thereafter, Little Augie left the party vowing to return to “do Slim up.” King, Augie’s friend, apparently, shot West in the midst of the mix-up. Stories of violence like this were broadcasted in the black weeklies, and tenants residing in the same building called the police. Harlemites’ complaints about loud noise, early morning partying, and violence spoke to their desires to live in safe neighborhoods, where they could raise their kids and restore themselves anew.109 While many Harlem residents demanded safety and tranquility in the neighborhood, landlords complained about the difficulty of attracting respectable tenants to their buildings. “I am, to my sorrow, the owner of 64 West 133rd Street,” said one landlord. He complained about a saloon located at 49 West 133rd Street, which “harbors the worst element possible in both

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sexes. For this reason it is impossible for us to get respectable tenants for our houses. Most of the respectable tenants when told about the houses on 133rd by our agent, invariably reply that they do not want to live on that street.”110 Yet not all landlords were concerned about the image of the community or the private relationships of their tenants. When a tenant from 123 West 142nd Street complained to the building agent about tenant behavior, the agent did not care “as long as they pay the rent and don’t get raided.” Each time the building was raided, the agent played ignorant and exclaimed, “he never knew people were that kind.”111 Leisure activity in Harlem residential spaces—rent parties, house speakeasies, and buffet flats—became terrains of contestation precisely because these activities involved a broad range of actors and sensibilities across race, gender, and class lines. These conflicts over public and private space underscore blacks’ divergent expectations, aspirations, and visions of Harlem and the community politics they engendered.

Conclusion The avalanche of whites crowding formerly black leisure space in Harlem precipitated a black flight to apartments and tenements. As I argued in chapter 1, white control over Harlem’s commercial real estate exposed the economic weakness of the black mecca. Prior to the mid-twenties, white and black proprietors vied for black patronage, but then Prohibition and the Negro Renaissance brought white patrons to Harlem. White ownership expanded in the 1920s to accommodate slumming whites, who replaced blacks as privileged patrons and nearly denied them their community right to enjoy commercial public places in their own neighborhood. Buffet flats, tenement speakeasies, and house rent parties were economic and cultural responses to white hegemony in Harlem, racism in the formal economy, and the exorbitant rents in the neighborhood. The vagaries of the labor market, family circumstances, and career aspirations often pushed black women and men into the informal economy. Overall, these commercialized residential spaces cultivated sites of congregation, where blacks found a degree of cultural autonomy and sociability. Despite this, Harlem’s places of public amusement and apartments were often dens of crime and violence. Along with the normative criminalization of black people, especially black women in America popular culture and social science scholarship, many blacks critical of vice activity in Harlem often corroborated, however unintentionally, and thereby legitimized, white society’s perceptions of black people. At the same time, black leaders were critical

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of the white presence, and its alleged effect on black womanhood. A decade before the white invasion to Harlem, black leaders had connected the spread of vice activity in public and private spaces to white ownership. With the data from the NYUL and COF, black journalists and religious leaders interpreted illicit behavior as a response to low wages and white impropriety. As Adam Clayton Power, Sr., argued, “no man can be moral in Harlem on $15 a week.” Reporting that whites owned 90 percent of the neighborhoods speakeasies in 1929, the Amsterdam News asserted, as Grey had two years prior, that whites could no longer “label Harlem as a hotbed of inherent and indigenous vice.” The weekly concluded, “TO SUCH PEOPLE the Committee’s report is a deserved rebuke. Harlem would be a far more decent place if they would keep away.”112 Nonetheless, by the end of the decade, the confluence of high rates in the arrests of black women and in child delinquency had mobilized a caucus of organizations to discuss what could be done for Harlem. The league, the COF, the Women’s Prison Association, and other organizations initiated discussions aiming to coordinate their efforts to find black social workers for both boys and girls and women. At the same time, black leaders also called for a squad of black undercover police officers to extend and improve upon the investigative work of Claymes in order to eradicate vice activity in Harlem apartments. This cross-organizational reform movement singly targeted black women. In the last year of the decade, more black women were arrested than ever before, notes historian Stephen Robertson. At the same time, however, this local anti-vice movement reflected the differing and contested goals of the New York Urban League, the Committee of Fourteen, and black tenants and landlords.113 With the cooperation of the police department and anti-vice agencies, respectable blacks tried to compel Harlemites to be responsible, law-abiding citizens and models of proper childrearing. While the working class was also concerned about questions of respectability, their endeavors to protect their children and to enjoy an evening of tranquility demonstrate how rent parties and other forms of apartment amusements were often incongruent with the needs of the black working class to reconstitute itself. These differences between the goals and practices of blacks within Harlem and their responses to New York–style racism are further illuminated by the black community’s engagement with the local issues of police brutality and self-defense.114

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5

“Demand the Dismissal of Policemen Who Abuse the Privileges of Their Uniform” Racial Violence, Police Brutality, and Self-Protection

The string of race riots punctuating black America during the World War I era and throughout the 1920s somehow missed Harlem. Globally known as the cultural and intellectual center of black America, Harlem had an aura of putative racial tranquility. James Weldon Johnson, proclaiming the exceptionalism of Harlem, claimed that there were no race riots in Harlem because blacks were incorporated into the city’s body politic. Accordingly, he explained, blacks in Harlem do not remain “merely ‘Harlem Negroes’; astonishingly soon they become New Yorkers.”1 He christened New York City and Harlem as urban sites of modernity, where migrants actualized their citizenship, regardless of their race and place of origin. Like many black reformers and leaders during the Progressive era, Johnson understood societal conflict as part of a natural process wherein racial and ethnic groups underwent a hazardous transition from rural to urban life.2 As Johnson explains bluntly, “a thousand Negroes from Mississippi brought up and put to work in a Pittsburgh plant will for a long time remain a thousand Negroes from Mississippi.” In this way, anti-black violence occurred not only because of interracial conflicts over jobs and residential space but also because of blacks’ failure to shed their rural southern identity. Johnson’s depiction of Harlem doubly misrepresents and mischaracterizes blacks’ long history of suffering racial violence in the urban North. According to Johnson’s racial calculus, blacks were partially culpable for the race riots. Yet he obscures not only the persistence of white mob violence but also the pervasiveness of police malfeasance—each of which played seminal roles in blacks’ experiences of violence in New York City. In Harlem, social and economic tensions as well as the racist acts of the police incited interracial violence and small-scale riots during the early twentieth century. Contrary to Johnson’s remarks about the harmony of the city’s race relations, city officials, especially the New York Police Department, rarely treated blacks as first-class citizens. Following blacks’ migration from lower Manhattan to Harlem, this chapter foregrounds the spatial dynamics of racial 153

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violence directed at blacks in the streets, their homes, jails, and at the police station. By focusing on small-scale and daily cases of violence, the various ways that racial violence—particularly police violence—shaped urban space that Harlemites inhabited comes into fuller relief. Black New Yorkers defended themselves against white mob attacks and police malfeasance, employing a range of strategies to protect the black community. Oftentimes, aspiring and elite blacks organized ad hoc associations and appealed to the authorities, the police commissioner, and the district attorney to investigate skirmishes and to fairly enforce the law regardless of the race of the culprit. This strategy, known as “legalism,” demonstrated blacks’ adherence to the law and order, as well as how some blacks tried to distinguish themselves from blacks engaged in criminal activity. Other blacks armed themselves for self-protection. These Harlemites had little faith that the New York Police Department would protect their rights; nor did they expect that the police would be held accountable to the black community. Collectively, these strategies of resistance reflected blacks’ demands for the protection of their community rights, as well as the intraracial tensions that developed as the police failed to treat Harlemites fairly. In order to prove the black community’s respectability, aspiring and elite blacks often pinpointed blacks as instigators of violence, re-inscribing criminal stereotypes of blacks. In the midst of the Great War, New Negro activists began to sanction self-defense as a legitimate response to police brutality. Their activism broadcasted many of the ideas that Harlemites already held and that some had already put into practice during the battles in the street with the police. By the late 1920s, pervasive cases of police brutality on the streets and police mistreat of blacks while in custody, known among contemporaries as the “third degree,” incited Harlemites, the New York Amsterdam News, and New Negro activists to wage a community-wide battle against police brutality.

“Police Indulged in Promiscuous Shooting” During the late nineteenth century, blacks experienced high rents, congestion, segregated housing, and especially racial violence, inducing them to move incessantly within the city in search of better housing conditions and affordable rentals.3 The 1900 race riot also swayed blacks to seek safer neighborhoods, but before blacks moved en masse to Harlem, they settled into the San Juan Hill district. Hemmed in predominantly white neighborhoods, blacks confronted territorial whites on a daily basis.4 Irish gangs and the white community at large fiercely protected their neighborhood. “My brother couldn’t go past Eighth Avenue to play, because he was black and that was

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Irish. Many times I would see my brother come in and get the broomstick in order to go out and fight. The Irish kids wouldn’t let the black kids cross St. Nicholas to go into the park and sleigh-ride,” explained Anna Murphy, a black Harlemite.5 Blacks used makeshift weapons from their homes on the streets and in some cases on the rooftops to defend themselves against whites and the police.6 Throughout the month of July of 1905, a series of interracial altercations spread from the Tenderloin to the San Juan Hill district. These skirmishes prompted blacks to mobilize their communities, and in some cases arm themselves, to protest pervasive occurrences of white mob violence and police brutality across the city. On the afternoon of July 9, 1905, a group of white toughs led by James Hunter attacked and cursed Henry Hart, a black longshoreman who lived at 441 West Sixteenth Street in the only all-black tenement building on the that block between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. They blocked Hart’s path to his building, but he escaped and ran home. Once in his apartment, he grabbed his revolver and exited the building. Then he shot into the crowd, hitting Hunter, who fell to the pavement with a bullet in his left side.7 This exchange escalated into a white mob attack on a black tenement building a block away. George and William Davis, two black brothers living at 442 West Seventeenth Street, investigated the commotion. The white crowd saw the brothers and surrounded them. Someone threw a brick that knocked down George. He returned to his feet with a razor in his hand. William pulled out a fork and slashed left and right through the crowd. Under siege, they finally escaped to their apartment building, followed by at least one thousand people who, according to the New York Times, “bombarded the house with all manner of missiles. Every window in the place was broken.”8 Although outnumbered, blacks defended themselves against the mob, returning violence with violence. On Sixteenth Street, whites packed the streets “from curb to curb,” and they threatened and dared blacks to exit the building. Blacks threw bricks, stones, and flatirons from the fifth floor. As the crowd scattered, a black woman began shooting into the crowd. Mary Donahue, a white woman, was shot in the neck while running to save her son. Police reserves arrived and invaded the building. They arrested four blacks on the top floor: Henry Holmes, Albert Middleton, Benjamin Johnson, and James Davis. The police then searched the Seventeenth Street building for the Davis brothers. William was armed with a bludgeon and George with a baseball bat. The police took them out of the building, and the white mob attacked the brothers. John Weish of 441 West Seventeenth Street yelled, “Knock out the cops and kill the niggers,” and was arrested. A white man hit George with a cobblestone and quickly escaped into the crowd.9

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According to the New York Times, these altercations were the result of an earlier brawl between Hart and the Davis brothers and white youth weeks before. Conflicts between blacks and whites arose when blacks moved into West Sixteenth Street in 1904. Whites not only attacked Hart and the Davis brothers but their entire building. The scale of the violence transcended interpersonal disagreement. Interracial struggles on the docks in 1905, where black and Italian workers “weakened the Irish monopoly on the waterfront,” also fomented racial hostility.10 These labor-related conflicts, exacerbating tensions within the neighborhood, further instigated interracial violence that shaped blacks relationship with the predominantly Irish police department. Less than a week after the Hart and Davis incidents another interracial conflict exploded in the San Juan Hill district. On July 14, a group of white youths, led by two seventeen-year-olds, harassed and attacked “George the Ragman,” a Jewish peddler, and William Pierce, a black youth who tried to protect the peddler, near 62nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue.11 Once the battle began, both Pierce and the whites called for reinforcements. Women ran to the scene to get their children, while men and boys of both racial groups ran to the aid of their friends and families. The screams and cries could be heard from two or three blocks away, according to the Times.12 Combatants threw bricks and bottles from roofs and fired gunshots. The black community prepared for battle in advance. “Nearly all the chimneys had been torn down, and the bricks arranged in little piles on the roof edges like piles of cannon balls. . . . The police say this is done in time of peace preparing for war,” described the New York Times. The police arrived only to find that their numbers were insufficient. Before the police subdued the riot, reserves arrived from more than five police stations. They arrested eight people—five whites and three blacks.13 The New York Age claimed that the police harassed black bystanders and neglected to protect them from “white hoodlums, in and out of police uniforms.”14 Policeman Patrick L. Walsh arrested Reverend James Smith, a black man who had a coal and ice business. According to the Age, Walsh struck Smith from behind once Walsh entered his establishment.15 Although smaller than Smith, Walsh beat Smith “senseless.” The officers told Commissioner McAdoo that “‘little Walsh had tackled the big Negro just brought in.’ Comparing the sizes of the two and noting how many more bandages Smith had than Walsh, Commissioner McAdoo commended his man for his pluck.” However, it was more likely that, as the New York Age asserted, Walsh was assisted by arriving officers.16 The police patrolled the San Juan Hill area for the entire weekend. Between Saturday and Sunday, the police arrested fourteen blacks and beat them in the police station. Police aggression like this

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towards blacks was a normal occurrence. Although white youths initiated the conflict, the police patrolled only black neighborhoods and harassed and arrested only black pedestrians. “The police have always evinced an arbitrary and insulting attitude, which was very offensive towards the residents in that portion of San Juan,” complained the New York Age.17 On a daily basis then, blacks encountered belligerent police officers and bellicose whites; the police harassed and brutalized black bodies and marked black inhabited areas as criminalized zones. Days later on Monday, July 17, 1905, police officer Roche ordered a group of black men in front of a saloon to move on or get inside. All the men followed his order except for Walter Powell. Roche struggled with Powell, who took Roche’s club and escaped through the back of the saloon. Roche fired a shot in the air and blew his whistle. As several cops advanced to the scene, someone dropped a brick from above, hitting Roche on the head.18 The other officers believed one of the black residents dropped the brick from the apartment building at 238 West Sixty-Second Street. They entered and arrested Arthur Moody, who begged the police not to kill him, stated a witness.19 Moody died in the hospital—he had been shot after being beaten. Police arrested several black men on the following Tuesday morning. All claimed that they were beaten at the police station. Walter Frazier, one of the victims of the police, stated, “Before it was my turn to go in I heard the sound of the clubs on the heads of other prisoners and heard them crying for mercy. I was frightened sick. When it came my turn I think I was struck about a dozen blows.”20 Under the guise that the police represented just law and order, these violent attacks on blacks and especially their registration into the criminal justice system legitimized the police’s actions. Robert Christopher’s wife called the district attorney’s office and stated that her husband avoided the scene but that the whites chased and attacked him. She said that the “police indulged in promiscuous shooting, wounding innocent people,” among them her husband.21 Mrs. Christopher believed that Officer McLaughlin had asked police officers of the West Sixty-Eighth police station to harass black people in the San Juan Hill area. A year before, McLaughlin was found guilty of killing James Patterson, a black man. Captain Cooney of the West Sixty-Eighth Street station was a “nigger hater,” Mrs. Christopher explained, and he allowed his officers to brutalize black citizens. Acting District Attorney Gans promised Mrs. Christopher an investigation.22 Mrs. Christopher’s comments illustrate her own and the black community’s familiarity with day-to-day violence. That she remembered the bellicosity of individual officers in the San Juan Hill district sheds light on the black community’s visceral memory of violence. Blacks of San Juan Hill understood that

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their individual and collective encounters with police officers could result in violent retribution at a later date. The New York Age took care to criticize the police department about the police’s attacks upon respectable members of the black community. Along with the DA’s investigation, a committee consisting of the religious black community, led by Reverend G. H. Sims, pastor of Union Baptist Church, asked Commissioner McAdoo to investigate the relationships among blacks, whites, and the police. They wanted the civil rights of “deserving AfroAmerican citizens” protected. Commissioner McAdoo, however, seemed less concerned about the civil rights of blacks and more about the civil rights of white citizens. As McAdoo explained, “A colored man strikes a white child, for instance. This is resented by a white man.” The Age opined scathingly, “Of all the examples of ignorant and imprudent prejudice, there is nothing which outgoes Commissioner McAdoo’s jaunty motivation of race riots.” The weekly also queried how McAdoo could comment as he did when “the riot just then quelled was provoked by . . . white boys.”23 As the New York Age remonstrated with the police department, and the committee demanded an investigation, McAdoo urged the respectable classes to disarm members of their race and community. Before the most recent riot, on the 15th of July, the New York Times reported that “before 9 o’clock seven colored men had been locked up in the West Sixty-eighth Street Station, charged with carrying concealed weapons. Six had revolvers and one had a huge carving knife.” After the black elite and Mrs. Christopher complained to the commissioner, as well as the acting district Attorney on the 19th, McAdoo explained to the daily, “I told him the first thing to be done was to disarm; that I had said that same thing to a certain class of Italians and the Chinese, and there could be no talk of peace until disarmament.” He continued, “On Saturday last, when the pawnshops were watched against the purchase and redemption of deadly weapons, the police seized nine loaded revolvers taken from these places by colored persons presumably for use.”24 Blacks had enough. Blacks armed themselves because of the constant threat of racial violence, the failure of the police to protect blacks’ civil rights, and especially the flagrant cooperation between white citizens and the police. Blacks not only pawned their personal possessions to purchase weapons but also collected money from patrons in the saloon to “defend the negroes accused of trying to kill Roundsman Walsh,” the officer whom McAdoo commended for pummeling Reverend James Smith only days before.25 Blacks’ endeavors to arm themselves reveal the probable debate and plotting stirred by police brutality in black neighborhoods throughout Manhattan. Considering the chain of conflicts occurring throughout these districts, blacks un-

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doubtedly shared and circulated information from the streets, black-owned institutions, and black and white newspapers. Much like other institutions in the black community, the saloon operated as an information center for the exchange of news about neighborhood life and work; it also functioned as a political space for blacks to rally support and resources to protect themselves and other black denizens in the neighborhood. In response to McAdoo’s demands for blacks to turn in their weapons, the committee carefully claimed that the police singled out blacks in their arrests and that, as the New York Age pointed out, whites incited the riot—not blacks. The committee made it clear that the behavior of the police was unacceptable. Reverend Simms complained that the “better class” of blacks had been mistreated and unjustly arrested. But not all blacks were innocent, the committee admitted. According to Reverend E. M. Daniels of the Fountain Baptist Church of Summit, “it was not the better class of colored people who make or start the troubles but that it was the lower class”; he also asserted that the police arrested more blacks more than “white toughs.” Making clear that its members were “representatives of the better class,” the committee “desire[d] that justice should be meted out, not only to the lower class of colored people, but also to those whites who participate in the riots and are more prominent in them than the colored people.”26 While the committee attempted to avoid a race war, the real potential for violent retribution from the police galvanized this “certain class of negroes” to arm themselves, fully aware of the consequences. Although McAdoo, as well as the New York Times, may have relied on stereotypes to implicate the so-called lawless colored element, he also acknowledged the veracity of foul play among his officers and, therefore, solicited the aid of the black leadership, understanding that the black church, especially, held sway in the black community. The committee sought protection from the police and discouraged armed self-defense. This strategy, which historian Sundiata Cha-Jua has called “legalism,” sanctioned the legitimacy of the legal machinery by using it to discipline criminals—both civilians and the police. Legalism demonstrated that blacks were law-abiding citizens, but it also required the law, in this case the police department, to be accountable to all citizens. As a result of the protests by the New York Age, black citizens, the arrested, and the committee, McAdoo transferred Captain Cooney from the West Sixty-Eighth Street station to the Union Market station. But, he warned, “the lawless colored element in the Twenty Sixth precinct must not misconstrue my act as any change of policy on my part with regard to dealing with them. I have instructed Capt. Handy to fearlessly and impartially enforce the law and to suppress promptly any disorder in that section.”27 By differentiat-

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ing itself from, as well as incriminating, blacks who armed themselves for self-protection, the committee sanctioned, albeit unintentionally, McAdoo’s labeling of those blacks as lawless. The committee also invalidated blacks’ rights to protect themselves from the unlawful behavior of the police, based on the contention that they belonged to a criminal class. By drawing such a line, the committee justified the police’s behavior as well as establishing latitude for blacks to be accosted and brutalized by the police. Yet in their own way, the committee’s call to mete out justice reflected its attempt to protect the community and especially end the conflict before the “lower classes of colored people” did so through violence. Meanwhile in Harlem, blacks, like their counterparts in the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill districts, encountered territorial whites and belligerent police officers. On Christmas day in 1901, a horde of Irish youth stoned a drunken black man on 130th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway. As three white men came to the black man’s aid, three black men, Burley May, Wallace Bird, and William Jones, all intoxicated, “overtook the trio near Amsterdam Avenue, and either believing them to be the offenders or not caring, started to punch them.” Interracial conflict, as this case indicates, was not necessarily predestined to occur. But once the fighting began, combatants drew sides along racial lines. According to the New York Times, blacks “rushed out of the tenements” and “revolvers began to crack and razors flash.” One black man “who had is head and face cut with a clasp knife” ran into B. B. Myers’s drugstore. The white mob threatened to hang the man if they got in, and once they did, only the presence of the police prompted them to flee.28 In spite of whites’ participation in the melee, the police targeted black perpetrators. The stoning of the drunken black man by Irish “hoodlums” played a minimal role in the police’s round up. Instead the police safeguarded the three white men and redirected their attention to tracking down blacks involved in the riot. The police searched tenements where “negroes were pulled out from under beds, in closets, and one was found in a wash tub.”29 In the end, the police apprehended almost two dozen men, all black. Rather than searching for and arresting all of the participants, the police exacted justice by detaining blacks for audaciously defending themselves and protecting members of their own race. These patterns of interracial violence in Harlem overlapped with the internal migration of blacks from lower Manhattan to Harlem before World War I. In 1907, only two years after outbursts of interracial violence in the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill districts, racial violence erupted in the summer months during the so-called “Negro Invasion.” As chapter 1 demonstrates, blacks’ successful endeavors to stake claim to Harlem real estate angered white tenants and homeowners. In mid-June, the police raided saloons on

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133rd Street between Fifth and Eighth Avenues in Harlem, brutalizing “good and bad” resorts. “Ever since the police made those raids there has been much bitter feeling in the district,” reported the New York Age. The raids escalated the tensions in race relations for the entire summer. In early July, bicycle policeman Genet tried to arrest Paul Langham, a black man, for disorderly conduct. But once Langham called for help, neighboring blacks immediately “swarmed out from their houses on the block and went to his assistance.” As they trampled upon Genet, reserve police officers arrived to his rescue and began pummeling blacks with the urging of whites in the area. Thereafter, the police stationed a bicycle squad in the area. While the conflict was primarily between blacks and the police, the flood of blacks settling into the neighborhood disturbed white residents. Still, in the midst of the real-estate race war, black newcomers not only forced white residents to share housing and public space with them but also displaced many of their white neighborhood friends and family.30 Weeks later on the evening of the 4th of July, another battle between the police and blacks commenced on 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. The dispute began when a bicycle police officer, Edward Conrad, charged a black man, William H. Brown, with firing a pistol in the air. Brown denied having a pistol, and as Conrad approached to arrest him, Brown yelled for aid and fought with Conrad. A black man immediately ran behind Conrad, and “slashed the policeman’s ears, nose and face until it was cut into ribbons.” At the same time, one thousand blacks surrounded and attacked the police officer, reported the New York Times and the New York Age. This time white people also joined the fray. According to the New York Age, “the white people of the neighborhood . . . heard the shouting and the fighting” and “saw that it was a white man who was being attacked [so] they . . . went for the Negroes.”31 Once police reserves arrived from the East 126th Street station, they pushed the crowd of black combatants towards Lenox Avenue; the police arrested Brown and other black men, but Joseph Beale, the man who slashed Conrad, escaped. Although blacks had just begun to move into Harlem, their presence incited a “moral panic” among the district’s dwindling and indignant white community. The conspicuous specter of bicycled policemen around the district represented the police department’s institutional response to blacks moving into Harlem. In spite of the demise of white unity in the housing battle, the police and white Harlemites joined to exact justice on—and to contain—their black neighbors.32 On August 4, 1907, another melee erupted on 136th Street and Madison Avenue—“the worst block of Harlem,” claimed the New York Times. After a baseball game between two white teams, a white and black man quarreled

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over the payment of a bet on the game, attracting a large crowd of blacks and whites. Once the black man struck the white man, “there was a rush made for him. Immediately the street was in an uproar.” Blacks fiercely resisted whites’ attacks and defended black tenanted buildings. Blacks watching the fracas from their windows “came rushing into the street, and joined the fray, and colored women hurled dishes from the windows on the heads of the fighters,” described the New York Times. Once again the police searched only black tenanted buildings. As the New York Times reported, “Inspector Thompson and Acting Captain Jackson ordered the men to patrol the streets and see that the negroes were kept within doors.” By targeting blacks and surveying their buildings, the police tacitly legitimized white violence upon blacks. Police surveillance mirrored and perpetuated societal notions of black criminality. The New York Times, similarly, caricatured and especially incriminated black behavior. The daily employed tropes of black criminality, such as the razorwielding Negro, and sanctioned police targeting of black combatants.33 Black Harlemites, like their counterparts in the San Juan Hill, armed themselves for self-protection. As the New York Age stated in the aftermath of the riot in July, “now, it is a fair statement of fact that the New York police force has a greater dislike for, and nags and persecutes more, the colonized Afro-Americans than they do any” other racial group in the city. Alluding to the 1905 race riots in San Juan Hill, the New York Age maintained that the violence was constant and suggested that the police commissioner had only condoned the police’s behavior. The Age pithily described the relationship as “a kind of war.” In fact, according to the black weekly, many black New Yorkers viewed it as war, too. So in preparation for battle, they armed themselves to “‘do up’ the police to the extent of their abilities and resources.”34 In 1906, W. H. Brooks, pastor of St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church, upbraided the New York Police Department for inflicting violence on innocent black people. Highlighting the virtue of the black man who was “an intelligent, hardworking Christian,” Brooks contended that the police needed better training in politeness and common sense. He noted that neither he nor any black leader had ever condoned lawlessness among blacks, but the “world must know that there are negroes and negroes.” Gauging the limits of legalism and respectability, Brooks openly challenged the legitimacy of the law. Brooks then warned, “the systematic persecution by the officers . . . the evident spirit of mob violence in the air, can do little else but force the negroes into selfprotection even at the risk of a violated law.”35 In July and early August of 1909, black Harlemites attacked police officers as they tried to break up intraracial skirmishes. Black leaders immediately came out to salvage Harlem’s reputation and condemned misconduct among

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blacks in the still-developing black community. On July 2, near 134th Street and Lenox Avenue, patrolman Boylan found two black women “tearing at each other’s hair,” and as he grabbed one of them, a crowd of “negroes closed about him, pushing and jostling him.” Somehow, he held the woman and blew the whistle for help. According to the New York Times, someone yelled, “kill the cops!” Thenceforth, hundreds of blacks from the streets and windows shouted and attacked Boylan and the incoming officers. About a month later, the New York Times alleged that blacks on 127th and Second Avenue, in East Harlem, stormed police officer Henry Leonard. The police had been warned that a dangerous dog was loose, so they deployed a few officers to fetch the dog. As officer Leonard saw a group of blacks petting a dog, he inquired to whom the dog belonged and if it had a license. One black man, whom the New York Times described as a “huge negro,” retorted, “What business is it of yours whether he’s got a license?” The black man “swung a right hand blow under the policeman’s jaw,” and “Leonard’s head flew up and he staggered back stunned for a few moments.” When reserves arrived, the gang fled and “disappeared.”36 To his congregation, Reverend Reverdy Ransom, pastor of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, on West 25th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, asserted that the appointment of black police officers would solve the problem of crime among blacks.37 He contended that the respectable blacks who had “continuously denounce[ed] the whites should show [their] honesty, broad-mindedness and sincere desire to see the laws are not broken by being as equally willing to condemn and seek to bring to justice the disreputable members of the race.” He urged the law-abiding members of the black community to get rid of the “bad Negroes.” Ransom hoped to galvanize the community, and encouraged “the churches and woman’s organizations . . . [to] join hands to rescue the good name of the race from those who are bringing it into disrepute.”38 The New York Age followed up Ransom’s exhortations with its own. While admitting that the police were known to be “over-meddlesome, mean and authoritative,” the Age conceded that Harlemites had provoked the last two incidents. The black weekly targeted particularly the behavior of young black men on the corners, whose “loud, and indecent language, not only make conditions hard for them, but hurt seriously the race.” The Age and Ransom tried to address the problem of crime in Harlem within the context of widespread police brutality and daily attacks from white gangs. Black leaders simultaneously advocated the appointment of black police officers and put forth a rigid and conservative line on questions of criminality among blacks. The Age asserted, “a Negro rowdy or criminal should get neither sympathy nor protection from respectable Negroes.” At the

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same time, the black weekly acknowledged the persistence of police brutality and that the line between criminality and youthful rebelliousness blurred in the view of the law. Yet the Age’s and Ransom’s pleas for community selfpolicing and the appointment of black cops still criminalized young black men’s presence on the street corners.39 These problems of police brutality, interracial youth violence, and crime persisted throughout the period before World War I. The Harlem Home News, an advocate of white realtors’ anti-black campaign, criminalized black public behavior and voiced the concerns of white Harlemites. In April 1911, black and white baseball teams and members of both races battled on the Olympic Field at 136th Street and Fifth Avenue. Led by Harry Lyons, “the invincible and inimitable shortstop,” the black athletes bettered their white competitors. The white team, the Silver Stars, dubbed “the hope of white race,” and fans in the grandstand unrelentingly harassed Lyons, who caught everything that went his way. Even the Harlem Home News admitted that he “leaped into the air a dozen times and knocked down liners that had all the earmarks of full-fledged hits.” One fan complaining about his large glove, stated, “make that fellow at short back off the field and take a nap in his feather bed,” and another shouted, “Why don’t you let him stretch a net?” To assuage the white commenters, one umpire asked Lyon to remove his glove, which immediately precipitated a blowup between the teams and their fans. Eventually, “bottles were hurled from the grand stand and the air was soon charged with baseball bats.” According to the Harlem Home News, more than one hundred blacks and whites engaged in the melee, which lasted about fifteen minutes. Three people were hospitalized, two whites and Lyons, whom the police arrested for felonious assault.40 Throughout the remaining summer months, the Harlem Home News reported that there were black gangs in the “big black belt.” Blacks individually but also in gangs challenged white violence in the streets. The National League for the Protection of Colored Women found that there were seven gangs and noted that “these gangs were organized for the defense of the colored boys against similar gangs of white boys in other streets.”41 According to one Works Progress Administration writer, “the exodus of the downtown Negro to Harlem around 1910 resulted in the formation of many gangs.” For blacks to get to school and travel to and from work and church safely, they had to defend themselves. “Needless to say, but P.S. 89 was the school where some of the toughest children learned the rudiments of self-protection as well as their A B C’s,” opined the WPA writer.42 Self-protection, at both the individual and community level, then, was part and parcel of blacks’ community consciousness and community identity. Thus, as migrants arrived primar-

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ily from lower Manhattan, they brought along their memories of day-to-day battles with the Irish and the police. Interracial gang violence was widespread in Harlem. As the Harlem Home News noted, “it is not a strange sight to sometimes see a fight among gangs— seldom officers interfere. These battles are considered legitimate.”43 The police neglected to intervene, perhaps, to leave black gangs as prey for the white gangs in their predominantly white neighborhood. White proprietors, however, complained about black gangs. One “prominent local business man” chided that “the police should lose no time in breaking up the negro gangs that infest the so-called black belt. In order to accomplish this most effectively and expeditiously the number of policemen on duty in that district should be tripled immediately. This will be expensive financially but human life is more important.”44 While it is unclear if the New York Police Department assented to his request to augment the patrol in Harlem, the police protected white gangs by targeting black people and black gangs in public places. These police practices were partly legitimized by spokespersons of the black community. The Harlem Home News noted that “high class” blacks had complained about black youth congregating around the subway on 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. Like Reverend Ransom two years before, a “progressive negro” argued that “rowdies should not be allowed to congregate on the corners.”45 In August, black youth, according to Harlem Home News, harassed white women and insulted passersby. A unit of police officers, dubbed the “Strong Arm” squad, arrested thirty-seven members of a gang. Thereafter, Reverend Farther Stewart, of black Harlem’s St. Mark’s Church, on West 130th Street, “congratulated the police on the masterly way in which they handled an ugly situation without loss of life.”46 Well before the Great War, black leaders understood police brutality and white mob violence as challenges to both their civil rights and to their masculinity. Their endeavors to rally support for redress often disclosed the readiness of many blacks to arm themselves for self-protection. In the summer of 1911, black ministers organized to protest reoccurring instances of white gang attack on blacks. Demanding that blacks “break the silence,” the New York Age charged that “Mob law, directed chiefly at men of the Negro race, is abroad in the city of New York.” It also asserted, “We must break the silence by a protest that all can hear, a protest that will reach the hearts of justice-loving New Yorkers, that will command the attention of the pulpits and reach the ears of the Mayor,—a protest that will protest in the language of outraged innocence and the determination of men.”47 Black ministers, including Reverend Dr. Ransom, Reverend Powell, Reverend R. Bolden, Reverend Sims among others, from the San Juan Hill district held a mass meeting, inviting all the black

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community to participate. But they also sought to preempt armed retaliation from the black community in view of “threats made within the past . . . by Negroes not disposed to be conservative, who have declared that unless proper police protection is given colored pedestrians they will take the matter in their own hands.”48 The Age and black leaders appealed to the black community’s masculinity, rooting the legitimacy of their protest in their commitment to law and order, conservatism, and first-class citizenship. As the Age announced, “this is no meeting of anarchists, nor a gathering seeking revenge.” In mid-June, in language anticipating W. E. B. Du Bois’s clarion call for blacks to “Close Ranks” in support of the Great War, the New York Age framed their protest against white mob attack not only as a demand for the protection of their civil rights but also as a demonstration of their manhood and especially their longstanding dedication to the city and the nation. Describing their intent, the Age stated, “it will be a manly meeting of manly men, all American citizens, full-fledged citizens, with a record of two centuries behind them, who will congregate in orderly fashion to consider their rights and rights of their race as citizens of New York and the United States.” As a means to quelling the intraracial debate about self-protection, the black elite asserted their undeniable and unarguable adherence to American citizenship, but only to a point. Though blacks’ manhood and civic responsibility demanded that they respect the legal process as law-abiding citizens, the abridgement of and the disregard for their rights might force them to assert their masculinity through violent self-protection. Foreshadowing the rhetoric of the New Negroes less than a decade later, black leaders warned that their faith in the legal process had limits. So while the Age and San Juan Hill’s black leadership framed their campaign as a protest against “crimes visited upon unoffending colored men,” like Brooks years before, they warned, “when the time comes for action of another character that time will take care of itself.” Black leaders tethered the politics of respectability to citizenship, manhood, legalism, and self-protection.49

“The Police of New York Make Too Free Use of Their Guns in Negro Districts” During and after the war, interracial violence persisted in other parts of the city, namely the San Juan Hill district, where a small black neighborhood was surrounded by a hostile white community.50 Only two months before the start of the Great War, the black community, once again, revisited the same issues, when a police officer beat Alexander Thomas, a black man, after he was already down from a gunshot in late May of 1914. Critical of white

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newspapers and the New York City Police Department, the New York Age observed that “the police of New York make too free use of their guns in Negro districts.” While the black weekly disagreed with violence, it rationalized the black community’s recourse to self-defense: “Where Negroes are concerned in Negro districts they [police] are ready to shoot whenever there is a disturbance of any sort, and, because they are, those who know that the police are disposed to give them no quarter are also ready to shoot and do shoot.”51 These interracial conflicts intensified during the World War I era, as the city’s black population increased and white New York failed to fulfill black migrants’ and Harlemites’ expectations of equal treatment. On May 26, 1917, a white mob rampaged through a predominately black street block in the San Juan Hill district after a black man, Benjamin Hamilton, and a white friend refused to pay for overpriced drinks. This skirmish resulted in the murder of Richard Hill, a thirty-year-old black man from 210 West Sixty-Fourth Street.52 In the Fifty-Fourth Street police court on the Monday morning following the attack, David C. Outlear, attorney for the defendants, stated that the police targeted blacks in their arrests. Most of the violence and shooting occurred on Sixty-Third Street. Although both blacks and whites participated in the riot, Outlear revealed that “not a white was arrested.”53 Only four days later, a black gang and Harlem passersby battled the police. In a saloon on 137th Street and Lenox Avenue, a man named Clark protested against the price of liquor and threatened the saloon’s employee with a razor. While walking outside with his daughter, James Mohan, an off-duty police officer, overheard cries in the saloon. He ran into the saloon and commanded Clark to give up the weapon. Clark told the officer that his gang would not allow the entire police force to take his razor, reported the Times. Daily occurrences of police brutality, interracial battles with white gangs, and especially the murder of Richard Hill only days before certainly influenced Clark’s actions. Mohan grabbed Clark and led him down the block. When the police arrived, they found over two hundred blacks trying to release Clark from Mohan. With their nightsticks, the officers dispersed the black men and arrested Clark and another black man, William Grant. The swift and fluid spread of Clark’s arrest to blacks and especially the readiness of the gang members to rescue him highlight the communication networks that were in place and at work in the streets. Black leisure places played an essential role in disseminating neighborhood information, as elements endemic to the black urban experience, such as housing congestion and the absence of recreation spaces, facilitated the use of the streets for play, pleasure, and especially political activity.54 After the arrests, the police department placed extra reserves in Harlem, fearing that the killing of Richard Hill on Saturday would incite more violence

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there and in San Juan Hill.55 The police may have also anticipated a black reprisal on the small white population still residing in Harlem. The death of a black man in San Juan Hill and daily conflicts among blacks, whites, and the police throughout black Manhattan heightened the potential for blacks to exact retribution upon white pedestrians. The occurrence of interracial and police violence in both black neighborhoods mirror the changing demographics of both districts. By the early 1920s, the majority of black New Yorkers resided in Harlem. Although both black neighborhoods warred with the police, blacks in Harlem combated primarily with the police while those in San Juan Hill continued to fight both white civilians and the police. During the next two months, more police brutality and interracial violence ensued. Two additional incidents, the beating of Reverend George Sims, the leader of the Columbus Hill committee, in Harlem by Officer Schwartz in June, and the East St. Louis riot in early July enraged black Manhattan. In East St. Louis, when black workers replaced white workers on strike against the Aluminum Ore Company, interracial strife escalated and then broke out on July 2, when white mobs, often joined by white police officers attacked blacks on trolleys and black passersby and set fire to blacks’ homes in East St. Louis. The following day in Harlem, Police Officer Hansen brazenly commanded more than two dozen black soldiers of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment, later the medaled 369th Regiment, to leave the corner of Sixty-First and Amsterdam Avenue. Most of the men followed Hansen’s orders, but not Private Lawrence Joaquin, who refused, claiming that Hansen showed no respect for his uniform.56 Joaquin’s defense of his civil rights, and in part his right to represent his country, triggered another riot. By the time the police arrived on the scene, nearly two thousand people of both races were fighting “with knives and clubs swinging and bricks flying through the air,” according to the Times.57 Colonel William Hayward of the Fifteenth Infantry investigated the riot and found that Joaquin had been unjustly arrested. Hayward stated, “I cannot find on shadow of justification for this arrest . . . I have not found any one who says that Joaquin was doing anything more than standing quietly on the street corner, or that he did more than protest verbally when ordered to move on.”58 This conflict of July 3 reveals the tensions between black and white civilians as well as the contradiction between black patriotism and race riots. Patriotic blacks hoped their service would win them improved social conditions, greater economic opportunities, and especially the protection of their civil rights.59 As one Harlemite, Haywood Butt, a member of the all-black 369th Regiment, exclaimed, “I thought there was a deficiency in the Negroes’ participation in civic affairs and that they should go in and prove that they were

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really worthy citizens.”60 As Butt suggests, in order for blacks to be considered citizens, they had to prove their worthiness. Yet black soldiers were targets of civil and state-sanctioned violence. Joaquin, a soldier in uniform, defended his right to stand where he chose, demonstrating the pride that many blacks felt, as well as the respect they expected for serving their country. To many whites, however, blacks’ patriotism had no bearing on their status as citizens. As a black solider complained after the war, “What more do I have to do to prove that I’m an American, too?”61 Racial violence directed at black people underlined to many blacks that their willingness to defend their country in a time of war, would bring about the same treatment as before the war. Many blacks questioned the logic that legitimized taking up arms to defend the United States, but not taking up arms to defend their own communities. As one black man stated, while watching the black troops marching in a parade in Harlem in 1917, “They’ll not take me out to make a target of me and bring me back and Jim Crow me.”62 The refusal of blacks to be targeted and “Jim Crowed” reflected their dissatisfaction with their treatment in the military and throughout the United States. The World War I experience politicized both African American and Caribbean veterans. Not only did blacks continue to arm themselves, but New Negroes articulated the grievances and convictions of blacks in New York City and around the country. In Harlem, New Negro community organizers encouraged blacks to defend themselves and to spread their ideas not only in the streets but also in black churches and anywhere else they were invited to speak. The Great Migration had triggered a chain of race riots across the South and especially the North. New Negroes saw the police as the coercive arm of the state, which neither protected blacks nor necessarily represented justice in black communities across the nation. This alternative political discourse further raised the political consciousness of Harlem, trumpeting the beliefs and practices of many blacks throughout the city.

Self-Protection and New Negro Community Politics After the East St. Louis race riot in early July 1917, Hubert Harrison advised blacks to take arms and protect themselves. On Independence Day, the day after the violence in San Juan Hill, Harrison held a meeting at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem.63 He encouraged “Negroes in the South, or in East St. Louis or anywhere else who do not enjoy the protection of the law, to arm for their own defense, to hide those arms, and to learn how to use them.” Harrison’s argument unsettled the black elite. Although they had challenged police brutality and white violence, the black elite—the New York Age and

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black ministers—had never condoned self-defense. But as Harrison and others saw, the law was unjust and did not protect black people. Edgar H. Grey, another speaker at the meeting, underscored the contradiction between U.S. political discourse and the treatment of blacks during the war, pointing out that “they are saying a great deal about democracy in Washington now . . . but while they are talking about fighting for freedom and the Stars and Stripes, here at home the whites apply the torch to the black man’s home, and bullets, clubs, and stones to the body.”64 A New York Age editorial chastised Harrison and Grey, replying, “No man, or woman either, for that matter, is a friend to the race, who publicly advises a resort to violence to redress the wrongs and injustices to which members of the race are subjected in various sections of the country.” Violence, even in self-defense, was untenable. The New York Age continued to have faith in the government to protect the rights of blacks. The black weekly wanted the law enforced, asserting, “we are insisting on the maintenance of law and order; we are claiming the protection of the law.” The Age believed that advocates of violence were “playing with fire.” Armed self-defense, it suggested, thwarted blacks’ chances of securing local and especially national government protection of their civil rights. Harrison’s advice undermined the potential rewards they would get after the war. His rhetoric directly questioned whether blacks’ military service would bring about the protections of their civil rights.65 Harrison and other street-corner intellectuals reinforced ideas that many black New Yorkers had already put into practice. The Age recognized and feared the power of New Negroes, particularly their ability to influence or, at the least, to encourage blacks to consider self-defense as a legitimate response to white attacks and police brutality. Harrison’s speech alarmed the conservative black weekly not only because it might “alienate public sympathy,” but also because it could potentially mobilize blacks in areas—such as the church—that were historically the domain of the “Old Negroes.” At the Metropolitan Baptist Church, about one thousand people attended the meeting and “enthusiastically” applauded the speakers. According to the New York Times, “Harrison won great applause when he declared the time had come for the negroes to do what men who were threatened did, look out for themselves, and kill rather than submit to be killed.” The Times’s characterization of the audience’s affirmative response to Harrison’s speech worried the Age, since the Times was publicizing a more radical discourse than the Age’s ideological approach.66 Harrison had also begun to criticize the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News for ignoring repeated occurrences of police brutality in Harlem. “What are the big Negroes of Harlem going to do” about police brutality, he asked in his newspaper, the Voice. Harrison demanded

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that more black police officers be placed in Harlem. But while Harrison was committed to civil rights, he also embraced the strategy of “direct action.” Harrison, therefore, legitimized self-defense not only in East St. Louis but also in Harlem. If the police refused to protect Harlemites’ rights, Harrison believed that Harlemites had the community right to defend themselves.67 By September of 1918, Harrison and other street speakers’ criticisms of police brutality impelled Captain Ward of the Thirty-Eighth Precinct to request the help of black ministers, such as Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and black leaders from the press and civil rights organizations, including James Weldon Johnson and James H. Hubert. The subsequent meeting, described as “one of the biggest get-together meetings between the police, the press, the clergy and business men of Harlem,” signaled the police department’s attempt to accommodate the black community. Captain Ward “laid great stress upon some of the men who speak on the streets inflaming the minds of the people against the police and the white businessmen in Harlem.” Expressing both a warning and a concession to the black leaders, he said, “we want real Americanism displayed in Harlem.” Ward used blacks’ appeals to citizenship in the time of war as leverage to pressure them to silence the array of immigrant and leftist radicals who as street orators openly embraced a seemingly antiAmerican political perspective. While conceding police misconduct, Captain Ward hoped that the assembly of black leaders could assuage the black population. The coterie of black leaders agreed to form a vigilance committee with Captain Ward as the chairman; the leaders would use their influence to speak against mob violence and assist the police if “any more outbreaks occur[ed].” In return, Captain Ward promised that his precinct would “have its share of race policemen,” but not until after the war. Harlem’s leadership still hoped that more police officers might mitigate relations between blacks and the police department, so cooperating with the police might increase the number of black police officers as well as showcase their loyalty to the city and the nation. Ward expected black leaders to counteract the efforts of the New Negroes, and for the time being the strategy worked. Hubert Harrison too joined the Vigilance Committee.68 Police brutality in Harlem, however, persisted, and the black public sphere continued to challenge white supremacy in the form of the New York Police Department. In its October 1918 issue of the Crusader, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) reported that the “brutality of police to Negro men and children in Harlem section, had aroused the people of that section to determined protest against the presence of all white policemen.” Quoting commentary from the New York Amsterdam News and Harrison’s Voice, the Crusader expressed Harlem’s collective critique of police brutality. The radical black

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magazine also published Andrea Razafkeriefo’s poem (from the Voice), which highlighted the limits of Harlemites’ appeals for citizenship through military service during the World War I era: Police Brutality in Harlem To Certain Policemen Hail to our bully policemen The Heroes of the town Who spend their time abusing And knocking Negroes down Who bl[i]ndly wield their night-sticks Spurred on by racial hate And thus betray Democracy Their uniform and state All honor to these policemen Who ever seek the chance To thank black men in Harlem Whose sons have gone to France, By cursing at their women While passing on their way And beating up their children Engaged in harmless play. All glory to these officers And may they stay at home For they would run like cattle It sent across the foam; For lack of moral courage Makes Cowards out of those Who, just because of Color, Would make a race their foes. All homage to these officers Whose actions help to teach The Hun to say that “Yankees Should practice what they preach.” Were they dismissed, the Kaiser Would meet a heavy loss

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For they with guns and night-sticks Should win his Iron Cross.69

Anticipating Claude McKay’s 1919 poem, “If We Must Die,” Razafkeriefo asserted that police brutality dishonored black men’s service to their nation, displayed the cowardice of the police, and symbolized the hypocrisy of the country’s commitment to democracy. Yet Razafkeriefo’s poem is explicitly about the police who patrolled Harlem. As they walked Harlem streets, the police disdained the dignity of black women and pummeled black children. In so doing, they violently challenged blacks’ community right to Harlem public space, and by extension black men’s ability to protect their women and children. Throughout the 1920s, street orators’ critique of police brutality and white mob violence remained a staple of black radical politics in Harlem. Thus, for example, the Tulsa race riot of 1921 became a focal point. The riot, lasting two days, began on May 31 after a black man was arrested for allegedly assaulting a white woman in an elevator. Subsequently, a small crowd of white and black Tulsans stood outside the courthouse, but after a tussle between a white man and an armed black man, the melee instantly transformed into a race riot, led by white mobs burning and pillaging black homes and businesses. After this riot, Harrison and the ABB organized various meetings throughout Harlem. At 135th and Lenox Avenue, the ABB promulgated armed self-defense and encouraged blacks to arm themselves. Then at the Palace Casino, they spoke to an audience of over two thousand, detailing the facts of the Tulsa riot and affirming black Tulsans’ right to defend themselves. On June 19, W. A. Domingo organized another meeting at St. Mark’s Hall. Domingo stated, “Our aim is to allow those who attack us to choose the weapons. . . . If it be guns, we will reply with guns.” By speaking at different venues, the ABB reached a greater segment of the black population. That the ABB gained access to these different venues and attracted such large audiences indicates that a section of Harlem and New York City considered, if not, supported self-defense.70 New Negroes advocated self-defense and in part legitimized the practices of many black New Yorkers who armed themselves against police attacks, as residents of San Juan Hill and the Tenderloin and now Harlem did. New Negroes publicly challenged the Old Negro, bringing to the fore, or airing, the thoughts that many blacks expressed in the saloons, on the streets, and in their own homes. New Negroes, therefore, disseminated their messages to more people and in a greater array of venues during World War I and postwar period. Drawing on the experiences of blacks throughout the country, the

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New Negroes pointed out that mob violence against blacks was not only a southern problem but also a New York problem.71

“An Indoor Lynching, or Near-Lynching”: The Black Public Sphere and the Third Degree In postwar Harlem, the black public sphere vigorously condemned police brutality, particularly a police practice known as the “third degree,” the beating of suspects while under arrest or in custody. The third degree came under attack at the dawn of 1922, after Luther Boddy, a nineteen-year-old, shot and fatally wounded two white police officers in Harlem. While many black weeklies denounced Boddy’s crime in particular and criminal activity in general, they also scorned the New York Police Department for recklessly and unnecessarily abusing Boddy. As the Chicago Defender explained, “the death of the police officers, unfortunate as it was, had, however, brought forcibly to attention the growing practice of New York policemen and detectives of unmercifully beating people placed under arrest, or taken into the station for ‘questioning.’”72 During the State Supreme Court case, Boddy testified that for several years he had been victim to repeated cases of beatings at the hands of the police. In late January, Marcus Garvey’s Negro World printed an editorial undersigned by an author named “New York American” about the Boddy case. The author lambasted the police for their “cowardice,” arguing that the police’s mistreatment of black prisoners made their “work dangerous.” Noting that Boddy killed the two detectives because he was “SO TIRED OF BEING BEATEN UP ALL THE TIME,” the author commanded the police to “abandon the ‘beating up’ process” and warned that “those that practice it are a menace to the lives of other men on the force.”73 In the March issue of the Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois queried, “What more pathetic, baffling, and heartrending case can one conceive?” While admitting Boddy’s culpability, Du Bois charged that society was also guilty, for it “laughed at him, insulted him, hated him.” Du Bois, like the others, criticized the police, characterizing the case “as one of the greatest outrages of our present police system.”74 The black public sphere’s response to the Boddy case highlights black New Yorkers’ shared attention to police brutality as a community issue. While the black community faithfully defended Harlem’s respectability, it also criticized police malfeasance both on the streets and inside the police precinct. This persistent critique of police malfeasance throughout the decade prodded the police to use the pages of the esteemed New York Age to repair its reputation. In late September of 1925, one officer from the Sixteenth Precinct police station in Harlem asked, “What reason has a law-abiding citizen to be afraid of

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a policeman?” He asserted: “Only crooks and criminals fear policemen.” Since they represented law and order, the police designated as unlawful any opposition to their authority. The police officer’s rationale, of course, contrasted with testimonials of blacks and the reportage of the New York Amsterdam News, among other print media. But from the police point of view, insofar as they did use “rough tactics,” they were adapting themselves to the violent environment in which they worked. Their behavior was an unfortunate carryover from past experiences in lawless districts rather than a response to the behavior of Harlem’s “best citizens.” Where the “best citizens” were involved, the police officer explained that “in such cases, policemen have made mistakes in misjudging the people that they were handling, being accustomed to a class that could only be kept within the law by rough tactics.” The police were not perfect—they “may err, even as does a housewife, a minister, a school master or a public official.”75 By associating themselves with people of model character and social standing, the police tried to enshrine their role as the embodiment of justice in Harlem. But to do this, they also had to disassociate themselves from their daily encounters with the black community. This belated attempt at community public relations reveals the developing power of the black community and its relationship to the police department. The police’s engagement in such a ruse in the pages of the conservative New York Age demonstrates their ebbing credibility among the people of Harlem. Blacks’ individual and collective resistance as well as the editorial activism of the New York Amsterdam News challenged the integrity of the police department. In the pages of the New York Amsterdam News and New Negro print media, black journalists reconsidered and revised Harlemites’ battles with the police from criminal acts to acts of self-defense. Although the activism of the black public sphere neither transformed nor equalized the relationship between the police and the black community, it produced an alternative critique of police brutality. Throughout the mid- and late 1920s, the black community more aggressively condemned police use of the third degree and other forms of police brutality. In an editorial on August 18, 1926, William M. Kelley, the New York Amsterdam News’s editor, branded the third degree “an indoor lynching, or near-lynching, bee sanctioned openly by authority.” The black weekly also exposed how “a police official was heard to remark that there is more law in the end of a nightstick than in the courts.” While the Amsterdam News explained that it was not surprised about the “apathy” of law-abiding citizens regarding police conduct, it urged the police department to “STOP PRACTICES of this kind.” For many Harlemites, police malfeasance partly explained lawlessness in the community.76 In several cases, police officers had beaten black

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men defending their wives, mothers, and girlfriends. In the same edition, the Amsterdam News printed an open letter to Commissioner McLaughlin from A. L. Totten, a concerned citizen. According to Totten, Emmanuel Jacobs, a black man, came to his wife’s defense when a black man with a gun broke into their apartment. The man was Detective Hart who was in plain clothes and never identified himself as a police officer. Jacobs “reliev[ed] Detective Hart of his gun,” returning the gun to Hart only after the police arrived. But after the Jacobs went to the police station, Hart and the other officers attacked Mr. Jacobs, “while his wife looked on.”77 Mr. Jacob’s defense of his wife, as well as Totten’s letter, represented not only the black community’s endeavors to protect black women but also black men’s attempts to assert their masculinity. According to W. R. Tatem, in a letter to the editor a year later, it is “enough in itself to incite the wrath of men, but when it comes to the mothers of our men being accorded such disgraceful treatment by the officers of the law, the time has arrived when a concerted effort must be made.”78 By attacking black women, police officers directly challenged black men’s masculinity, which derived partly from their ability to “protect their womanhood.”79 Totten and the Amsterdam News also pointed out that black victimization was often at the hands of black police officers. Almost two decades before, black leaders claimed that having blacks on the police force would demonstrates blacks’ commitment to law and order, bestow honor upon the race, and assuage relations between the black community and the police department. Black officers’ complicity in these cases of police brutality, however, questioned the assumption that shared race would necessarily improve police behavior. As Totten expressed, “if he [Detective Hart] is the first to raise his hands against law-abiding and unoffending citizens, then it is no honor to the Negro race to have a man of his type on the police force.”80 While Hart’s behavior did not honor the race, it did, however, highlight how the shield and the uniform might authorize abuse. As black journalist Edgar M. Grey opined, “it appears to be the fact that a uniform on the back of any man, regardless of his race or color, makes him feel that it is proper to be brutal.”81 Black officers’ behavior was consistent with the police department’s accepted practice of brutality, indicating how shared racial identity did not necessarily engender racial solidarity. By the summer of 1928, unremitting occurrences of police harassment clashed with blacks’ ignored grievances—igniting Harlem to explode.

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“Why 3,000 Harlem Citizens Rebelled against the Authority of the Police Department” On July 22, 1928, violence between blacks and the police culminated in “the worst riot in the district.” After seven o’clock in the evening, approximately two thousand blacks and one hundred and fifty police brawled on 139th Street and Lenox Avenue. When Harlemites saw four police officers assault Clarence Donald, a black man, the community retaliated. As reserves from different precincts arrived, Harlemites threw bricks, dishes, and chairs from their windows. The riot persisted for an hour, until the presence of the emergency squad armed with machine guns and a fire truck finally subdued the crowd. Harlem had mobilized the black community to protect itself from police brutality. The conflict began in Mr. Henry and Mrs. Zerlena Chavis’s apartment at 559 Lenox Avenue. At approximately seven in the evening, Mrs. Chavis stated that three drunken men knocked on her apartment door asking for Robert, her husband. She testified that she had closed her door and awakened her husband, who went to the kitchen door and let the three men into the apartment. She left the apartment and ascended the stairs, followed by a black man, Clarence Donald. Donald choked her and she screamed, testified Mrs. Chavis. Ruth Jackson, a tenant on the fifth floor, heard the scream and brought Mrs. Chavis into her apartment. Jackson also identified Donald as the aggressor. Mrs. Chavis then screamed out the window, yelling, “Catch that man.”82 The actual riot began with the beating of Donald in the street. The New York Times and the black weeklies named Officer James Kubeil as the first officer to arrive at the scene. Both the conservative New York Age and the New York Times sided with the police, while the New York Amsterdam News sided with Donald and the black community. The Times and the police officers’ testimonies stated that Donald initiated the conflict and that the black community defended him. Donald kicked Officer Kubeil in the groin when the officer tried to grab him and “several negroes standing nearby joined in the affray,” according to the New York Times.83 In its July 28th edition, the New York Age legitimized the police department’s response and encouraged the black community to obey the law. The black weekly’s coverage and analysis of the “near riot” illustrates the old guard’s attempt to mitigate negative portrayals of the black community by white newspapers that characterized the blowup in Harlem as a riot. Thus, the New York Age’s narrative of the bouts in Harlem pointed to the criminal acts of Clarence Donald and his associates rather than the black community

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at large. “The trouble all grew out of the unruly actions of a trio of boisterous rounders, who had been absorbing extra potations of Harlem gin,” described the New York Age.84 The black community, like all communities, had criminals and curious passersby. More importantly, the clash in Harlem had little to do with racial animosity between the police and the black community as “shown in the fact that both Negro and white policemen were concerned.” Further proof, claimed the New York Age, was evidenced by the involvement of “one of the colored officers [who was] not even . . . on duty at the time.”85 The city’s white dailies manufactured the riot, surmised the Age. There were neither “thousands of Negroes rioting” nor an exchange of fire between the police and Harlemites. According to the black weekly, “there is no charge of any brutality by the police making the arrest.” Instead, it concluded that “in fact they are to be commended for the moderation they exercised in handling the crowds and not resorting to the use of clubs or revolvers.”86 As the esteemed alderman and editor of the New York Age stated, “the disturbance ‘came up like a thunderstorm and disappeared as quickly.’” The New York Age tried to counter negative stereotypes of the black community as lawless and violent. At the same time, the black weekly aimed to illustrate the community’s commitment to law and order. The Age’s analysis and coverage of the “near riot” painted the conflict as an incident, an unfortunate misunderstanding. As the Age opined, “there is something in human nature that sends the average mortal to the thick of the crowd to find out what’s the matter. Then, it is not always safe to conclude that the police are invariably in the wrong, and that the fellow resisting arrest is the victim of police brutality.” While there were surely cases of police malpractice, in “most cases the prisoner has either been caught in commission, or attempt, of some crime, and the police are guarding the public by putting him under arrest.” The Age urged Harlem denizens to leave the legitimacy of the arrest to “the courts to decide” and recommended that “good citizens . . . rather support the officers of the law than attempt to hinder their action.”87 By treating the event as an incident, the New York Age tried to salvage the race’s and the entire community’s reputation. Many blacks, however, viewed the police’s belligerent behavior as the rule rather than the exception. Harlemites remembered their confrontations with police violence as eyewitnesses and as participants in the streets, as prisoners in police custody, and even as residents in their own homes. While the Age tried to deny that the police brutalized Harlemites, its description at the same time revealed otherwise. As the New York Age acknowledged, the crowd “exhibited evidences of being embittered against the white police.”88 The crowd’s retaliation against the bellicosity of the police officers reflected the repressed and collective anger of the black

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community. Even as the New York Age emphasized the virtual absence of violent exchanges between the police and blacks, the black weekly reluctantly admitted that Harlemites endeavored to liberate Donald from the grasp of the police. Blacks’ retaliation against the police, the reserves from four police precincts, and the emergency squad that “arrived in its truck carrying the regulation machine gun and the rifles” bespeaks Harlemites’ conviction that the police were unfair, and, undoubtedly, blameworthy. The police charged Donald with disorderly conduct on the complaint of Chavis and felonious assault on the complaint of Officer Kubeil. On August 14, Judge Dodge found Donald guilty of the first count; he served ten days in the workhouse. Months later, on February 20, 1929, Donald pled guilty to felonious assault. In the period between the affray on July 22 and winter 1929, the New York Amsterdam News initiated an anti-police brutality campaign, vigorously criticizing the police department for its treatment of Donald, as well as, once again, providing Harlemites space to share their experiences and opinions on the matter with the weekly’s readership. At the start, the Amsterdam News sided with the black community. On the front page of its July 25 edition, the headline read, “Why 3,000 Harlem Citizens Rebelled against the Authority of the Police Department.” Framing Harlem’s response to the police as an insurrection, the black daily explained that the riot began primarily after Officer Destella’s struck a black woman after she boldly challenged the police officer, stating “Shame on you . . . beating that man [Donald] like that for nothing.” After Destella hit the woman, her friend “knocked [Destella] out flat,” according to witnesses. The riot began, in part, because the black woman censured the police officer, and after her courageous defense of Donald, the black community followed in suit.89 The front page of the Amsterdam News audaciously demanded “brains not brutality” from the police department and warned that if Police Commissioner Warren did not do something, “consequences of a serious nature are compelled to follow.” The consequences, Kelly, the editor portended, might be more violence. “Three thousand people can’t be wrong,” he argued; the police department’s behavior was unjust. Police officers, black and white, “who use their uniforms as a cloak behind which to commit assault and murder” should be dismissed. Otherwise, he suggested, the black community would act again, for “the sight of a man with upraised hands being clubbed by a policeman is sickening. It is cowardly. It is one of those sights which men and women cannot endure, no matter what happens.”90 As more detail surfaced about the July riot, the New York Amsterdam and the black community intensified their critique of police brutality. Harlem eyewitnesses claimed that the police unnecessarily bludgeoned Donald. The

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witnesses claimed that Donald was not in Chavis’s apartment during the altercation; all placed him on the street, drunk and staggering. Gertrude Simmons, a tenant of 65 West 139th Street, stated that police officers Kubeil and Destella clubbed Donald without saying a word. Simmons also alleged that Officer Destella intended to kick Donald, but missed and kicked Kubeil in the groin.91 Other eyewitnesses, Pedro Suner and St. William Grant, also confirmed Simmons’ story. As each came forth to speak on Donald’s behalf, the police promptly arrested them. While Donald was in custody, the police assaulted him. “When Donald was taken to the police station he was walking, but they brought him out on a stretcher,” reported the New York Amsterdam News.92 In its August 1 edition, the weekly reported that Dermot Bailey, who was also arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct and later released, heard plain-clothes men and one uniformed police officer beat Donald behind closed doors at the West 135th Street police station.93 As in cases that had been occurring since before World War I in San Juan Hill and Harlem, police attacks on the streets were often the first of many assaults blacks endured once arrested, including assaults while in custody. According to Bailey, Donald screamed “Kill me! Kill me. I’ll tell you nothing!”94 The arrest of Suner and Grant further confirmed the black community’s suspicions of the police’s guilt. Before Pedro Suner, a twentyone-year-old native of Panama, was scheduled to testifiy, Patrolman Young arrested him for assault. Attorney Smith protested that the police framed Suner, arguing that the police officers tried to “gag” Suner’s testimony on behalf of Donald. Suner testified on the stand that Donald was drunk, walking down the street singing and dancing the Charleston, just as Gertrude Simmons had testified. He claimed that he watched Donald for five or ten minutes and that as Donald neared 139th Street, he heard the woman scream.95 Patrolman Young alleged that during the riot, Suner took a stranglehold upon Young with his left arm and reached for Young’s revolver with his right. Samuel W. McFadden, a black officer injured during the riot, corroborated Young’s testimony. Attorney Smith challenged Young about the credibility of his testimony, considering that Young weighed 210 pounds while Suner weighed about 130 pounds. Smith asked, “And you want us to believe that you could not protect yourself against this young man, the defendant?” Young stated that he had been grappling with another prisoner. Smith asked him what happened to the prisoner, and Young stated, “He got away.” Smith continued to question Young, asking him if he could identify the man and if the man was in the courtroom. Young exclaimed, “Well, I could go down the aisle and pick him out.” As Young stood up and glanced over the court-

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room, Detective Farrington of the West 135th Street Station whispered something in Assistant District Attorney Martin’s ear. Farrington, according to the Amsterdam News, saw that “Young’s testimony was about to fall through.” Subsequently, Martin asked Young if it was true that he could not arrest the prisoner because he was already in custody, indicating that Clarence Donald was the prisoner. Young replied that he did fight with Donald as Suner attempted to grab the officer’s gun. Suner was charged for simple assault and found guilty.96 In the Washington Heights court on August 14, St. William Grant, another eyewitness of the brawl between Donald and the officers, testified that he overheard the officers say they were going to frame Suner. According to Grant’s testimony, Destella kicked Kubeil, and patrolman Richardson beat Donald with a club while Destella and Kubeil held him down.97 He also corroborated the testimonies of Cecil Lee and H. E. Armstrong, who stated that Donald “was not in the Chavis apartment before the disturbance.”98 The moment after Grant left the stand, the police arrested him in court for robbery. Herman Ellis, a white taxi cab driver, claimed that Grant had robbed him. In court to testify against Donald, Ellis recognized Grant and told an officer that Grant had robbed him in the hallway of 204 West 119th Street. In a letter from Tombs Prison to Judge Panger, Grant called into question Ellis’s story. Grant had attended each of Donald’s court hearings and had seen Ellis the morning of August 14, hours before his arrest in the afternoon. In a letter to Judge Panger, Grant expressed emphatically, “They frame me that I Rob a white taximan the Saturday before the Riot in Harlem. Hon Panger I was in Court three times before I was arrested [on the] charge for robbing him. He was also there three times, on the 4th time he cause my arrest.”99 The magistrate, Hyman Bushel, questioned whether it was “probable that he [Grant] would return to court when he knew his own liberty was in danger?”100 It was clear to Bushel that Grant had been framed. While Grant was in custody, black and white officers assaulted him. Concerned about the police employing the third degree on Grant, Counselor Smith requested protection for Grant from the magistrate, noting that upon arrest, Grant was unblemished. The arresting officer, Detective Webber, accused Grant of attacking him during the fingerprinting process. According to Webber, “He was yelling ‘Murder,’ throwing chairs, and he tore all his clothes from him, making it appear that he was beaten by the police and refused to walk.”101 Webber also alleged that Grant refused to enter his cell, banged his head against the walls, and took his clothes off in order to validate Attorney Smith’s characterization of the police department. During his first arraign-

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ment, Grant was “hardly recognizable,” and in the lineup he could barely stand.102 His clothes were “in ribbons,” his nose was fractured, his skull was cut, and he suffered injuries to his ribs and groin. His bail was set at five thousand dollars, but reduced to twenty-five hundred. After Grant spent ten days in lockup, District Attorney Martin attempted to raise his bail to ten thousand dollars, stating that “certain colored people upon whose word he could rely” had told him that Grant and Donald belonged to “a vicious organization.”103 District Attorney Martin’s machination failed. Grant told the Amsterdam News that he was abused. He was beaten at the Wadsworth Avenue police station and then taken in the taxi of Herman Ellis to the 123rd Street Station, where he was burned with cigar butts on his hands and legs and advised to testify that he stole Ellis’s watch and money. Grant also stated that he was told that the charges would be dropped if he testified against Donald. Grant refused, replying, “I will not lie on anybody.”104 During his second arraignment, Grant pled not guilty. Testimonies by Dermot Bailey and Samuel Grant (St. William’s brother), provided the defendant with an alibi, each placing Grant at home between 2 a.m. and 6:30 a.m.—that is, during the time Ellis claimed that Grant robbed him, which was approximately 2:45 a.m. On December 4, the judge acquitted Grant and stated that he believed Grant was framed. Black newspapers were relieved to have their complaints confirmed. No longer could the police argue that they were innocent of harassing and brutalizing Harlem denizens.105 As the chicanery of the police department surfaced in the Grant case, Officer Kubeil and others built a case against Clarence Donald on the charge of assault. As each officer told his story, they collectively presented Donald as a brute. In their statements to District Attorney John H. Levy on November 20, officers James Kubeil, Samuel McFadden, Irwin Young, and Herman Destella described Donald as the aggressor while portraying themselves as defenseless victims of both Donald and the “thousands of people . . . throwing bottles from the houses down at us.”106 By highlighting that Donald “kicked” and “choked” them, and especially the severity of their injuries and the length of time they missed work, the officers represented Donald as a criminal rather than as a victim of police brutality, thereby reinforcing the familiar image of the violent negro. The officers’ testimonies hardly proved that Donald had assaulted Officer Kubeil. Although they depicted Donald as the aggressor, none of them actually saw Donald kick Kubeil in the groin. At the end of his statement, Kubeil claimed that there were two eyewitnesses, Officer John L. Pendergrass and Herman Ellis, the taxicab driver who tried to frame Grant. On November 21,

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Officer Pendergrass presented his version of the story to District Attorney Levy. Like the officers before him, he explained how Donald single-handedly accosted officers Young, Destella, and Kubeil. According to Pendergrass, Donald “caught him [Kubeil] by one arm and Young by the other, and he kicked Patrolman Kubeil in the groin.”107 But Kubeil stated that as he “went over to help Destella,” Donald ‘kicked me in my private.”108 By February 1929, Donald finally pled guilty. Kubeil’s charge of assault against Donald in part endeavored to silence the critics of the New York Police Department. The successful conviction of Donald and depiction of him as a brute legitimated the police’s aggressive treatment of blacks in Harlem. In the midst of the cases against Donald, Suner, and Grant, the New York Amsterdam News waged an anti–police brutality campaign, which focused on the police’s violent treatment of blacks on the streets and in custody. By early August and throughout 1929, the New York Amsterdam had induced black readers to share their experiences of and views about the police brutality in Harlem and across the city.

The People “Will Soon Put a Stop to Police Brutality in Harlem” The New York Amsterdam News lambasted the police department, calling its actions towards the black community police terrorism. In so doing, the weekly picked up where the community left off. In an op-ed titled “The Man in the Street,” in late July of 1928, the black weekly printed readers’ responses to articles and editorials in the news. While the Age characterized the “near riot” as a non-racial, unfortunate misunderstanding, the Amsterdam News focused on the actions of the police officers, demanding that “the police force in Harlem must be rid of both white and colored officers who use their uniforms as a cloak behind which to commit assault and murder.”109 The black weekly highlighted the unlawfulness of the actions rather than the racial identity of the police officers. Readers of the Amsterdam News also responded to the violence in Harlem. One such reader, H. Riley, encouraged the black community to take a stand against police brutality, saying that “it was high time for the Negro press, pulpit and platform to blend their voices in a torrent of boiling denunciation against the vicious attitude and self-assured power of policemen in Harlem.”110 “As a Negro and a piece of humanity,” he also solicited the support of the “liberal press” and others to slay “the octopus of injustice.” But Riley concluded that self-defense was also an option. Like New Negro activists before him, Riley understood that if the police did not protect blacks’ rights, then they would have to protect themselves. Although he encouraged all to “join hands,” he believed it was legitimate to “employ the

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measure offered by the immortal poet, Claude McKay: Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back.”111 The Amsterdam News and respondents to its editorials also argued that the police mistreated blacks under police custody. This critique contrasted with and undermined the Age’s assertion that the court decided the verdict of the arrested. By framing police violence directed at black prisoners as a form of adjudication, the Amsterdam News pinpointed the police abuse of their power. An anonymous respondent stated that “Our protectors, I think, resort to drastic measures in the treatment of their prisoners, without justifiable reasons.”112 The respondent attested to the belief among many in Harlem that the police were more oppressive than protective. In an editorial titled “Lawless Policemen,” the Amsterdam News quoted lines from the “Police Practice and Procedure” rules and encouraged “all policemen . . . to commit to memory” the principle that “the power to punish is vested in the judiciary. For instance, if you apprehend a murderer, you must not necessarily strike him. . . . If you do you are usurping the power of the judiciary.”113 Months later, in March of 1929, the Amsterdam News again charged the police department of brutality. While admitting that Edward Allen, a black motorist, committed three offenses, the black weekly claimed that the police “tried, sentenced and punished him on the spot.” Connecting Allen’s beating to the case of police brutality in Harlem the previous summer, the Amsterdam News asked, “What else can they [the police] expect when they act like a gang of thugs, beating up defenseless prisoners? How can they expect the police uniform to be respected when the wearers of it resort to lynch law; when they terrorize the community instead of protecting it?”114 The New York Amsterdam News’s critique of the police department and campaign against police brutality resonated with a segment of the black community and evinced the distrust and animosity of many blacks in Harlem and New York City concerning the behavior of the New York Police Department. In charging that the police had a problem of brutality and that it was the responsibility of the police department to correct it, the Amsterdam News encouraged blacks to organize to pressure the police department to reform itself. In March of 1929, Reverend Ethelred Brown, of the Hubert Harrison Memorial Church, applauded the Amsterdam News for calling “public attention to the acts of violence of the police in this district [Harlem].” He added, “you deserve all the more to be congratulated and commended as you seem to be standing alone in this public duty of manly protest.” In an editorial titled “Police Terrorism,” the weekly encouraged Harlemites to organize and demand that the police department discipline the unlawful behavior of police officers, arguing that measures could be taken to end police brutality. Citing

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a case in Jersey City, New Jersey, as a model for community mobilization, the black weekly described how Commissioner Beggans of that city held a public trial at which 1,500 people attended. Beggans dismissed the offending officer, Lieutenant Dugan, who had assaulted a black woman in the station house, from the police force. Commissioner Beggans stated, “Every mother, sister and sweetheart here has every right to walk into a police station and to walk out unmolested.” The Amsterdam News followed with “THE SAME RIGHT belongs to male citizens, whether in Jersey City or Harlem,” and asked that the people “get together in Harlem as they did in Jersey City and demand the dismissal of policemen who abuse the privileges of their uniform.” To rally support for their campaign, but also to warn the police department, the paper urged Harlemites to raise their own expectations of themselves and announced that “they will soon put a stop to police brutality in Harlem.”115

Conclusion The Amsterdam News’s editorial campaign and “The Man in the Street” oped gave voice to the disenchanted voiceless, creating a nonviolent avenue for redress and perhaps renewing blacks’ faith in the political process by encouraging mass participation and community self-determination. In their own way, both black weeklies contributed to expanding blacks’ political consciousness and diversifying the black public sphere. The New York Amsterdam News broadcasted blacks’ experiences of state-sanctioned violence and legitimated Harlemites’ collective act of self-protection, exposing the weekly’s readership to positions on police brutality that had long reverberated in the streets, in saloons, and in the homes of black New Yorkers but rarely in the newspapers in such a sustained manner. Neither of the black weeklies advocated selfdefense as a legitimate response to police brutality; instead, each addressed the problem of police brutality in a way that shaped the issue of self-defense. While the Age attempted to present Harlem as a law-abiding community by labeling any form of violence, including blacks’ self-protection efforts, criminal, the Amsterdam News tried to channel blacks’ discontent into a form of participatory politics through mass community involvement. Furthermore, the 1928 race riot signaled a shift from blacks’ responses to the 1900 riot. The later Harlem riot and the accompanying campaign against police brutality were extensions of black community rights—specifically the right of blacks to be safe in their own neighborhood and the right to police accountability. Since before the Great War, blacks’ self-protection activity countered and supplemented the Age’s and the black elite’s approach to the issue of police brutality, highlighting the failure of the police department and the district

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attorney to protect black citizens, as well as the limits of legalism as a political strategy. By encouraging Harlemites to organize on their own behalf, the Amsterdam News empowered blacks to depend on themselves rather than on a committee of respectable black leaders. With greater power being channeled into the hands of the people through community mobilization, blacks had an alternative form of self-defense besides arming themselves for self-protection.

Conclusion

On March 19, 1935, Lino Rivera stole a penknife from the Kress Store on 125th Street, and an employee seized him. Rivera tried to break away and bit his captor, who called the manager. As the ambulance arrived for the employee, a hearse coincidently pulled up behind the store. Immediately, a rumor spread that the Rivera was dead. He was not. Hours later, two local groups arrived with pamphlets, gave speeches, and carried signs protesting yet another case of police brutality.1 Once again, Harlem exploded. In the aftermath of the riot, Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia promised Harlemites that he would form a commission to investigate conditions in their district. Once the report was completed, Mayor LaGuardia refused to publish its findings. By the spring of 1936, black and left-wing newspapers had reported that LaGuardia had “suppressed” the report. But on July 18, 1936, more than a year after the riot, the New York Amsterdam News brazenly published the complete report. Of course, the findings that various city agencies had blatantly discriminated against black citizens were no surprise to Harlemites and black New Yorkers in general.2 A week later, the New York Amsterdam News pinpointed the contradiction between the city’s proclaimed cosmopolitanism and the fact of state-sanctioned racism: “the entire report is a sordid and poignant drama of the aspirations of a people abused and discriminated against in the world’s greatest city, which boasts of its tolerance and high regard for all groups in its metropolitan make-up. It is one continuous story of segregation, exclusion, repression, and complete disregard of the state constitution.”3 In New York City, as Kelly Miller explained less than a decade before, “the largest case of segregation in the U.S.” was alive and well.4 Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, blacks in New York City tenaciously mobilized against various local manifestations of racial, class, and state-sanctioned discrimination. In the midst of black New Yorkers’ search for better housing and safer neighborhoods in the aftermath of the 1900 race riot, they found auspicious prospects in Harlem. There, they took pleasure in the district’s spacious housing and its vibrant cultural and institutional life. The promise of the Negro Mecca raised Harlemites’ expectations of the new neighborhood and New York City overall. Indeed, blacks’ strivings to fulfill these unmet expectations constituted the inspiration for 187

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Harlem community politics. The early battles for social reform and better housing as well as protests against police brutality, white mob violence, and vice activity, among other neighborhood issues in Harlem, spotlight the already heightened level of black activism in Harlem before World War I, as well as its roots in the San Juan Hill and Tenderloin districts. During the Great War and thereafter, black activism escalated as the Great Migration from the South and the Caribbean augmented Harlem’s prewar black population. Throughout the 1920s, blacks struggled to improve their community both independent of and in concert with the activism of the New York Urban League, the NAACP, and black radicals such as Hubert Harrison, A. Phillip Randolph, and Frank Crosswaith. As the tenant movement, the organizing efforts of the Trade Union Committee for the Organization for Negro Workers, the projectionist union, and anti-police brutality campaigns illustrate, political engagement at both individual and collective levels was a hallmark of Harlem community politics. These struggles and others established the infrastructure for black politics in the 1930s and beyond. In mid-August of 1934, journalist T. R. Poston of the New York Amsterdam News publicized the groundswell of discontent over housing conditions in Harlem and gave its readers a history lesson on the rent strike in the district. For several weeks, Harlem tenants had protested against high rents in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem. As Poston described, “daily, three women with sandwich signs over their shoulder take their places in front of these houses and place slowly to and fro before the buildings. At stated intervals the marchers are relieved by other women and the picketing continues from early morning until night.” The women told him that they would withhold their rents until the landlord “redecorate[s] our apartments, improve[s] the sanitary conditions of our buildings and see[s] to it that we have better service from their employees here.” When asked, “But suppose the landlord won’t do it?” the woman replied, “then he will have to dispossess 200 families . . . and that will cost him a pretty penny.”5 Much as they did in the tenant campaigns against high rents of yesteryear, black women led these strikes for improved housing.6 The Sugar Hill campaign, as this study has shown, sprang from a longstanding history of black protest in Harlem. According to Poston, “the rent strike is not a new weapon in the hands of Harlemites. It has been used many times, with varying degrees of success, since Harlem became the happy hunting ground of unscrupulous real estate sharks and operators.” Characterizing landlords in language similar to Richard B. Moore of the Harlem Tenants’ League, Poston located black activism in the period “after the first mass migration of Negroes to Harlem.” In postwar Harlem, blacks struck for higher wages and demanded better housing conditions and lower rent. These small-

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scale public protests established the basis upon which blacks launched largescale public demonstrations of civil disobedience, such as the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns that reverberated across the nation in the 1930s and 1940s.7 Black mobilization and activism before the Great Depression signaled blacks’ endeavors to build the neighborhood of Harlem as they envisioned it. Inspired by the possibilities of Harlem, blacks hoped to enjoy their semi-autonomous institutions, establish a stable home life, and experience a measure of social mobility. The array of oppositional and political activity and tactics—from anti-vice activism and rent parties to labor strikes and violent self-protection— displayed in the black district and throughout the city represent blacks’ efforts to enact their community rights, not necessarily to achieve civil rights. The diversity of political activity also showed blacks’ coming to grips with the modicum of opportunities afforded them in all areas of New York City. These struggles in Harlem constitute the earliest waves of the black freedom movement in the urban North in the twentieth century. Since the founding of the NAACP in 1909 in the city, black leaders failed to effectively pressure city officials to enforce the state’s civil rights laws. In the years before the Depression, the mayor, the police department, white proprietors, and white people in general unceremoniously ignored blacks’ civil rights. Demands for the enforcement of extant laws fell on deaf ears; furthermore, as seen in the case of the housing campaign in post–World War I Harlem, legislation targeting individual negligent landlords failed to address residential segregation. Organizational cooperation among Crosswaith’s TUCONW, the NUL, and other black labor associations—the first black popular front—foundered in the face of the duplicity of the AFL, as it endeavored to ward off the rising threat of the Communist Party. By the late 1930s and 1940s, black activists understood that they required more than civil rights legislation, moral suasion, and respectability, though the early phase of the black freedom movement was never limited to these strategies. The “rights” movement in the North constituted a social movement not only for desegregation and political empowerment but also for anti-discrimination laws that targeted the specific issues. Thus black politics in the 1930s and thereafter signaled an expansion of and a re-centering on the issues and tactics employed during the turbulent twenties rather than a departure.8 Much more than the epicenter of black artists and intellectuals, Harlem’s predominantly working-class community was also the training ground for freedom fighters—tenants, trade unionists, and anti–police brutality activists—who, while only ordinary people, defiantly demanded no less than what they deserved and doggedly expected no less than what they were due.

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Notes

Introduction 1. The Citizens’ Protective League, Story of the Riot (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 1. 2. Ibid., 2. 3. Ibid., 4. 4. Quoted in Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of the Ghetto (New York: Elephant Paperback, 1996), 52. 5. See Khalil G. Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 88–145. Muhammad uses the phrase “incriminating culture” to describe the social science literature that explained the “negro problem” as a matter of blacks’ inferior culture rather than their inherent inferiority. This way of perceiving black people was followed by local officials and white dailies during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 6. James Baldwin “Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?” Essence 27, no. 7 (November 1996): 112. 7. Harlem’s black population consisted of African Americans from the South and North, as well as migrants of African descent from the British and Spanish Caribbean and from Africa. When possible, I identify the nationality of personalities; in general, however, I interchangeably use “blacks” and “Harlemites” to represent the black population. Neither of these terms is synonymous with “African American.” For the Caribbean presence in Harlem, see Ira De Reid, The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics and Social Adjustment, 1899–1937 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); Irma Watkins-Owen, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Winston James, Holding the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1998); Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1998); Joyce Moore Turner, Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); and Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 8. Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of the Ghetto, and Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Joe 191

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William Trotter Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991); Joe W. Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–30 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); James Grossman, Land of Hope: Black Southerners and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Carole Marks, Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., The New African American Urban History (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996); Lillian S. Williams, Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York 1900–1940 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999); Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 9. Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with Me Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 2010); and Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness. 10. Nathan I. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). The scholarship on Garveyism is vast; for a sample, see E. David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960); Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976); Tony Martin, Marcus Garvey, Hero: A First Biography (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1983); Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991); Ula Y. Taylor, Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina University Press, 2002); and Colin Grant, Negro without a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). On the Great Depression and black politics, see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Cheryl Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?” Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press 1991). 11. Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, “The New Negro in the American Congo: World War I and the Elaine, Arkansas, Massacre of 1919,” in Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850–1950, ed. Charles M. Payne and Adam Green (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North

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Carolina Press, 2007); Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom; Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, eds. Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Claudrena Harold, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918–1942 (New York: Routledge 2009); and Mary G. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 12. Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 4. My concept of community rights builds on Hassan Kwame Jeffries’s notion of “freedom rights.” Jeffries prefers freedom rights to the long civil rights movement, since it is “more useful to frame black protest as part of an African American freedom struggle, with emancipation as a critical turning point in its evolution.” See Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press), 257–59, n. 15. In that sense, the early black freedom movement for community rights in Harlem had the objective of securing community control, not necessarily establishing civil rights. For scholarship on the “long civil rights movement,” see Beth T. Bates, “‘Double V for Victory’ Mobilizes Black Detroit, 1941–1946,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, eds. Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”; Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Patrick D. Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For a critique of the “long civil rights” literature, specifically the care needed when comparing northern and southern racism, see Sundiata Keita Cha Jua and Clarence Lang, “The Long Movement as ‘Vampire’: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92 (2007). 13. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 3. For black power at the local level, see Peniel E. Joseph, “Introduction—Community Organizing, Grassroots Politics, and Neighborhood Rebels: Local Struggles for Black Power in America,” in Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Bates, “‘Double V for Victory.’”

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14. Davarian L. Baldwin, “Introduction: New Negroes Forging a New World,” in Escape From New York, 19. 15. Quotation from Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 3. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 6–7. The radical and racial roots of black politics, such as Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the African Blood Brotherhood, are well established and consequently do not receive significant treatment in this book, though they are mentioned briefly when relevant to issues of community rights and community politics. For Garveyism, see notes 10 and 11, above; for black radicalism in Harlem, see James, Holding the Banner of Ethiopia; Solomon, The Cry Was Freedom; Turner, Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance; Perry, Hubert Harrison; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy; Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom. 16. Aldon Morris and Naomi Braine, “Social Movements and Oppositional Consciousness,” in Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest, eds. Jane Mansbridge and Aldon Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 25; Aldon Morris, “Reflections on Social Movement Theory: Criticisms and Proposals,” in Rethinking Social Movements: Structures, Meaning, and Emotion, eds. Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 237. 17. Gross, Colored Amazons, 6. 18. Kelley, Race Rebels, 7 and 9. I use individual and collective resistance to represent what political scientist Michael Hanchard calls “coagulate politics,” or situations when disparate political actors join forces in response to a specific circumstance, such as a case of police brutality. The advantage, as Hanchard explains, is “to increase the likelihood of positive political outcomes for the actors involved,” while the “implications and consequences of their actions are limited to the immediate circumstance of the political environment therein.” Michael Hanchard, Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33–34. 19. Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 156. 20. Lewis, In Their Own Interests, 92. 21. Levi Hubert, “Whites Invade Harlem,” in A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essay of the WPA, by Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, and Other Voices of a Generation, ed. Lionel C. Bascom (New York: Amistad, 1999), 24.

Chapter 1. The Making of the Negro Mecca 1. James Weldon Johnson, “The Making of Harlem,” Survey Graphic: Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro 6, no. 6 (March 1925): 635. 2. George Edmund Haynes, “Impressions From A Preliminary Study of Negroes Of Harlem, Borough of Manhattan, New York City, 1921,” 104, unpublished, box 1, George

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Edmund Haynes Papers (GEHP), Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture (SCRBC). 3. Kelly Miller, “The Causes of Segregation,” Current History 25, no. 6 (March 1927): 829. 4. Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2005). 5. Lynn B. Feldman, A Sense of Place: Birmingham’s Black Middle-Class Community, 1890–1930 (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press), 3. 6. For politics of dignity, see Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 122. 7. Feldman, A Sense of Place, 2. 8. For a discussion of black consumerism see Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996); Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents; Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes; and Erin Chapman, Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 9. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of the Ghetto (New York: Elephant Paperback, 1996), 94; quotation from New York Age, December 5, 1912. 10. Osofsky, Harlem, 75–76. 11. Ibid., 90–91. 12. Ibid., 93–95; Juliet E. K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, and Entrepreneurship (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1998), 198–200. 13. Winthrop D. Lane, “Ambushed in the City,” Survey Graphic: Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro 6, no. 6 (March 1925): 694. 14. “Harlem Negro Colony to Fight Evictions,” New York Times, May 2, 1904, 5. 15. “To Make Color Line Costly in New York,” New York Times, July 26, 1904, 7. 16. “Real Estate Race War Is Started in Harlem,” New York Times, December 17, 1905, 12. 17. Osofsky, Harlem, 99. 18. “Bid for Negro Tenants,” New York Times, December 13, 1910, 22. 19. “Put 15-Year Ban on Negro Tenants,” New York Times, February 18, 1911, 1. 20. “The Negro Invasion,” New York Times, December 17, 1911, 14. 21. Ted Yates, “Real Estate in Negro Harlem,” 1, The Housing of Negroes of New York, Works Progress Administration (WPA), 1936–41, SCRBC. 22. Gardner Jones, “The Pilgrimage to Freedom,” 24, Migration and the Negro Population of New York City, WPA, SCRBC. 23. Quotations from the New York Age, March 30, 1911, in Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, ed. Allon Schoener (New York: New Press, 2007), 24.

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24. “Loans for White Renegades Who Back Negroes Cut Off,” Harlem Home News, April 7, 1911, 1; “Alert Owners Use the Law To Solve Invasion Problem,” Harlem Home News, May 10, 1911, 1; New York Urban League (NYUL), Twenty-Four Hundred Negro Families in Harlem: An Interpretation of the Living Conditions of Small Wage Earners, 1927, 6–7. 25. “Status of Harlem Negroes,” New York Times, March 28, 1913, 19. 26. NYUL, Twenty-Four Hundred Negro Families, 7. 27. “Negroes in 130th St. House, Residents between Fifth and Lenox Avenues Protest,” New York Times, June 29, 1912, 7. 28. T. J. Woofter, Jr., “Racial Separation” in Negro Problems in Cities, ed. T. J. Woofter, Jr. (College Park, MD: McGrath Publishing Company, 1969), 73; Osofsky, Harlem, 45. 29. Winfred B. Nathan, Health Conditions in North Harlem, 1923–1927 (National Tuberculosis Association, 1932); and Osofsky, Harlem, 129–31. 30. NYUL, NYUL, Report 1920, 3, no. 1 (January 1921): 5; NYUL, “A Challenge to New York,” Annual Report, Year 1927, 6. 31. Adam Clayton Powell, Against the Tide: An Autobiography (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938), 68. 32. Osofsky, Harlem, 114–15. 33. Quotation from Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 65–69. 34. “Payton Closes Harlem Realty Deal Involving Million and a Half Dollars,” New York Age, July 12, 1917, 1 and 7. 35. Walker, The History of Black Business in America, 186; Louis B. Bryan, “Brief History of the Chamber of Commerce,” December 17, 1936, WPA Reel 3, no. 27, Negro Organizations in New York City, SCRBC. 36. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan, 154; and Wallace Thurman “Odd Jobs in Harlem,” in The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2003), 77. 37. “$4,500,000 Is Spent Annually in Harlem,” New York Age, October 3, 1912, 1; “Negro Business Men Coming,” New York Age, December 12, 1912, 4. 38. James Weldon Johnson, “The Harlem Gold Mine,” New York Age, December 14, 1914, 4. 39. “Store Rentals in New York,” New York Age, October 19, 1911, 4. 40. “Influential Trade Body,” New York Age, April 13, 1916, 2. 41. “130 Stores; 16 Owned by Race,” New York Age, March 9, 16, 1916; “Lenox Avenue and Its Trade,” New York Age, April 6, 1916, 1. 42. “Negro Business in Harlem,” New York Age, April 27, 1916, 4 and Walker, The History of Black Business in America, 186. 43. “Influential Trade Body,”1–2. 44. “The Saloon Is Passing,” Chicago Defender, February 14, 1920, 4. 45. “Negro Business,” New York Amsterdam News, August 29, 1928, 16. 46. Taylor Gordon, Born To Be (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 97.

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47. Ibid., 103. 48. Clyde Vernon Kiser, Sea Island to the City: A Study of St. Helena Islanders in Harlem and Other Urban Centers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 122. 49. Ibid., 124. 50. Paul Seymour, “A Group of Virginia Negroes in New York City” (M.A. essay, Columbia University, 1912), 30–31. 51. Kiser, Sea Island to the City, 164. 52. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 43. 53. For interracial relations in other parts of New York City, see Elizabeth Clement, “From Sociability to Spectacle: Interracial Sexuality and the Ideological Uses of Space in New York City, 1900–1930,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 6, no. 2 (June 2005): 25; and especially Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 54. For the concept of congregation, see Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 90, and Kelley, Race Rebels, 43–51. 55. Of course, I recognize that blacks often worked simultaneously in the formal and informal economies. See chapter 4. 56. Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1940), 117; Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 84–86; Ethel Waters, His Eye Is On the Sparrow: An Autobiography by Ethel Waters, with Charles Samuels (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), 124–30. 57. Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982), 70–71. This paragraph is shaped by Kelley’s assertion that “knowing what happens in these spaces of pleasure can help us . . . unveil the conflicts across class and gender lines that shape and constrain these collective struggles.” Kelley, Race Rebels, 47. 58. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 118 and 170; Anderson, This Was Harlem, 110–14; Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 160. 59. Thurman, Collected Writings, 62. 60. “The Darker Side of New York,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, October 9, 1926, 402. 61. Anderson, This Was Harlem, 60. 62. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 162. 63. Arthur P. Davis, “Growing Up in the New Negro Renaissance: 1920–1935,” Negro American Literature Forum 2, no. 3 (Autumn 1968): 54. 64. Thurman, Collected Writings, 56. 65. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 162. 66. Davis, “Growing Up in the New Negro Renaissance,” 54.

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67. “Dislikes Negroes in Harlem,” New York Times, July 7, 1912. 68. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The N.A.A.C.P.,” Crisis, October 1911, 242. 69. Jane Dailey, “Deference and Violence in the Postbellum Urban South: Manners and Massacres in Danville, Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 63, no. 3 (August 1997): 555. 70. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Third Annual Report (January, 1913), 24. 71. “The NAACP,” Crisis, March 1912, 205; New York Age, January 25, February 1, 1912. 72. Charles Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1909–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 122. 73. Kellogg, NAACP, 123; and Mark Robert Schneider, “We Return Fighting”: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 263. 74. Schneider, “We Return Fighting,” 263. 75. John C. Walter, The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920–1970 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 34. 76. For blacks’ cultural battles in the marketplace and popular culture more broadly, see Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, and Chapman, Prove It on Me. 77. James Weldon Johnson to the F. W. Woolworth Company, October 18, 1921; Mr. Griffin to National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, attention Mr. James Weldon Johnson, October 21, 1921; and F. W. Woolworth Company, attention Mr. Griffin, October 27, 1921, reel 21, part 11, series A, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). 78. Letter to Childs Company from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, June 14, 1919, reel 21, part 11, series A, Papers of the NAACP. 79. Jessie Fauset, letter to General Manager of Gimbel Brothers, September 12, 1919, reel 21, part 11, series A, Papers of the NAACP. 80. Jessie Fauset, letter to John Shillady, September 18, 1919, 2, reel 21, part 11, series A, Papers of the NAACP. 81. James Weldon Johnson to Marcus Loew, November 30, 1921, reel 28, part 11, series A, Papers of the NAACP. 82. “Sues Harlem Theater; Segregation Charged,” Chicago Defender, October 22, 1927, 11; Jacob Brigman to Honorable James J. Walker, Mayor, December 10, 1929, reel 28, part 11, series A, Papers of the NAACP. 83. James Weldon Johnson to Marcus Loew, November 30, 1921. 84. “Discrimination in Theatres Said to be Growing Worse,” Tattler, October 1924, reel 21, part 11, series A, Papers of the NAACP. 85. M. Waller French to Rev. F. A. Cullen, December 20, 1920, reel 4, part 12, series B, Papers of the NAACP. 86. Mrs. M. L. Doran J. Ogan to Mr. Spingarn, October 11, 1919, reel 4, part 12, series B, Papers of the NAACP. James Weldon Johnson coined the term “Red Summer” to describe the wave of race riots during the summer of 1919.

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87. “Race Row on Elevated,” New York Times, July 6, 1922, 7. 88. Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black WorkingClass Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (June 1993): 75–112. 89. Michelle Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 10. 90. See chapter 5 for a discussion of racial violence and police brutality in Harlem. 91. “Dragging the Race Down,” New York Age, June 9, 1910, 4. 92. “Conduct in Public Places,” New York Age, September 28, 1911, 4. 93. “Rowdyism in Harlem,” New York Age, January 11, 1912, 4. 94. “Conduct in Public Places,” 4. 95. “Rowdyism in Harlem,” 4. For a discussion of the early movement for black police officers in Manhattan, see Marilynn S. Johnson’s important Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 85 and 86. My analysis builds on but differs from Johnson’s in several ways. While Johnson states that the discussion of the appointing black police emerges to halt police violence in San Juan, I argue that this campaign comes about to stop police brutality and intraracial crime there and in Harlem. As I have shown, black leaders were concerned about black public behavior and black masculinity and about their effects on the reputation of this new black community in Harlem. 96. R. R. Wright, Jr., “Social Work and Influence of the Negro Church,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 30 (November 1907): 89. 97. “Race Is Dancing Itself to Death,” New York Age, January 8, 1914, 1. 98. “Hold Services in Playhouse,” New York Age, March 3, 1910, 1. 99. Harold Cooke Phillips, “The Social Significance of Negro Churches in Harlem” (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1922), 31. 100. “Harlem Church Votes Expulsion from Membership of Any Member Given To Attending Movies or the Theatre,” New York Age, February 19, 1927, 1. 101. Ralph E. Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches, and Settlement Houses: The Black Experience, 1885–1910,” Journal of Negro History 60, no. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn, 1984): 108. 102. Wright, Jr., “Social Work and Influence of the Negro Church,” 89. 103. Maude K. Griffin, “The Negro Church and Its Social Work—St. Mark’s” (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1905), 75. 104. “Dereliction of Duty,” New York Age, June 24, 1909, 4. 105. Adam Clayton Powell, “The Church in Social Work,” Opportunity, January 1923, 15. 106. Deborah Gisele Thomas, “Workers and Organizers: African American Women in the Work Force and Club Movement, 1890–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1998), 106–7. 107. Mary L. Lewis “The White Rose Industrial Association: The Friend of the Strange Girl in New York,” Messenger, April 1925, 158.

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108. Floris Barnett Cash, African American Women and Social Action: The Clubwomen and Volunteerism from Jim Crow to the New Deal, 1896–1936 (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2001), 94. 109. Cash, African American Women and Social Action, 94–95. 110. Lewis, “The White Rose Industrial Association,” 158. 111. Floris Barnett Cash, “Radicals or Realists: African American Women and the Settlement House Spirit in New York City,” in Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 15 (Fall 1991): 7. 112. “White Rose Home Industrial Assn. to Celebrate Twenty-ninth Birthday” New York Amsterdam News, February 10, 1926, 4. 113. “Report of the White Rose Home for the Summer of 1906,” White Rose Mission and Industrial Association Collection, SCRBC. 114. “White Rose Industrial Association: An Appeal to Our Friends,” White Rose Mission and Industrial Association Collection, SCRBC. 115. Ibid. 116. “Moral Betterment,” New York Age, April 28, 1910, 4. 117. Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 88–145. 118. Nancy J. Weiss, The National Urban League, 1910–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); Jesse T. Moore, A Search for Equality: The National Urban League, 1910–1961 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981); and Toure F. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 119. National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (NLUCAN), Bulletin of National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes: Report 1913–14 and 1914–15, Announcement 1915–1916 5, no. 1 (November 1915), foreword. 120. NYUL, “A Challenge to New York,” 8. 121. NYUL, Annual Report 1925, 3. 122. James H. Hubert, “Harlem—Its Social Problems,” 46. 123. As historian Victoria W. Wolcott explains, “reformers in this period foregrounded the presentation of a respectable community, and particularly respectable women, as a primary goal of reform. To fulfill this goal, they sought to transform migrants into respectable, self-sufficient citizens.” Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 8. While I agree with Wolcott, my conceptualization of the politics of respectability and citizenship includes the question of black manhood, especially in terms of violence, intraracial crime, and the protection of black women before the Great War. Wolcott, on the other hand, considers the rise of masculinity in the post–World War I / New Negro era. 124. NLUCAN, A Challenge to Democracy: Bulletin of NLUCAN, The Migration of a Race, Annual Report 1916–1917 7, no. 1 (November 1917), 9. 125. Madge Headley, “Constructive Forces” in Negro Problems in Cities, ed. Woofter, 162. 126. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 196.

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127. Guichard Parris and Lester Brooks, Blacks in the City: A History of the National Urban League (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1991), 44. 128. NLUCAN, Bulletin of NLUCAN, Report 1915–1916, Announcement 1916–1917 6, no. 4 (November 1916): 11, and NLUCAN, 1915, 18. 129. The league and black churches established various programming for boys, such as the JPPL, Boys Clubs, and Boys Scouts among others to address high delinquency rates, crime, and overall respect for the law. See Nina Mjagkij, Light in the Darkness: African Americans and the YMCA, 1852–1946 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003); Summers, Manliness and its Discontents, 4. These ideas about masculinity are developed further in chapter 5. 130. NYUL, Bulletin NYUL, A Year of Service, Report 1919 1, no. 2 ( January 1920): 9. 131. Ibid. 132. NYUL, NYUL, Report 1920, 10; NYUL, NYUL Annual Report 1921, 11; New York Urban League Study 1935 (hereafter NYULS), 81, folder: Affiliates file, Department of Industrial Relations, box 32, National Urban League Records (NUL), Part 1, series D, Collections of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (LC). 133. NYULS, 75, and NLUCAN, 1915, 22. 134. NYULR, 1919, 11. 135. NYUL, Bulletin of NYUL, Annual Report and List of Contributors 1923, 7. 136. NYULS, 75. 137. NLUCAN, Report 1915, 22. 138. Executive Secretary James H. Hubert, News Letter to the Members of the Executive Board of the New York Urban League, August 8, 1921, 2, folder: Historical Information, New York City Urban League, 1921–39, box 10, NYUL, Part 1 Series E; NYULAR, 1920, 12. 139. NYULS, 72. 140. NYUL, 1923, 8; NYULS, 81, 82. 141. NLUCAN, 1915, 14. 142. NYULAR, 1925, 9; NYULS, 1935, 94. 143. See Francille Rusan Wilson’s The Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). 144. NYULS, 5. 145. Winfred N. Nathan, “Health Conditions in North Harlem, 1923–1927,” Social Research, Series 2 (National Tuberculosis Association, 1932), 56. 146. Ira De A. Reid, “Mirrors of Harlem: Investigations and Problems of America’s Largest Colored Community,” Social Force 5 (June 1927): 65–66. 147. Historian Cheryl Hicks makes a similar point regarding the absence of preventive and social services for black women. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 173; Nathan, “Health Conditions in North Harlem, 1923–1927,” 57.

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Chapter 2. “Not to Save the Union but to ‘Free the Slaves’” 1. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, eds., To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans From 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 108; James Weldon Johnson, “The Making of Harlem,” Survey Graphic: Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro 6, no. 6 (March 1925): 637. 2. Charles S. Johnson “Black Workers and the City,” Survey Graphic: Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro 6, no. 6 (March 1925): 643. 3. Charles Lionel Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist of New York: Problems and Conditions among Negroes in the Labor Unions in Manhattan with Special Reference to the N.R. A. and Post-N.R.A. Situations (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 216–18; The literature on blacks and the labor movement is extensive, ranging over a variety of debates. For early scholarship on blacks and labor, see Charles H. Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States 1850–1925: A Study in American Economic History (New York: Vanguard Press, 1927); Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York: Atheneum, 1969); Lorenzo J. Green and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner (New York: Russell and Russell, 1930); and William H. Harris, The Harder We Run: Black Workers Since the Civil War (New York: Oxford Press University, 1982). For modern interrogation of the labor movement and labor histories, see Herbert Gutman, “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America: The Career and Letters of Richard L. Davis and Something of Their Meaning, 1890–1900,” in The Negro and the American Labor Movement, ed. Julius Jacobson (New York: Doubleday, 1968); Herbert Hill, “Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 2, no. 2 (Winter 1988); Neil Irving Painter, “Black Workers from Reconstruction to the Great Depression,” in Working for Democracy: American Workers from the Revolution to the Present, eds. Paul Buhle and Alan Dawley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Painter, “The New Labor History and the Historical Moment,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 2, no. 3 (Spring 1989); David Roediger, “‘Labor in White Skin’: Race and Working-Class History,” in Reshaping the U.S. Left; Popular Struggles in the 1980s, eds. Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1988); Noel Ignatiev, “The Paradox of the White Worker: Studies in Race Formation,” Labour/Le Travail 30 (Fall 1991); Eric Arnesen, “Following the Color Line of Labor: Black Workers and the Labor Movement before 1930,” Radical History Review 55 (Winter 1993): 54–87; Arnesen, “Up From Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History,” Reviews in American History 26 (1998): 146–74; Joe W. Trotter, “African Americans in the City: The Industrial Era, 1900–1950,” Journal of Urban History 21 no. 4 (May 1995). 4. Kenneth T. Jackson, “The Capital of Capitalism: The New York Metropolitan Region, 1890–1940,” in Metropolis 1890–1940, ed. Anthony Sutcliffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 321. 5. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 334, 338.

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6. Emanuel Tobier, “Manhattan’s Business District in the Industrial Age,” in Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City, ed. John Hull Mollenkopf (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), 82, 101; The Economic Status of the Wage Earner in New York and Other States (New York: National Industrial Conference Board, 1928), 16. 7. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 250; Tobier, “Manhattan’s Business District,” 82. The industries serving the consumer market included printing, pianos, food products, and specialized metalworking firms. 8. The Economic Status of the Wage Earner, 8–14; Hadassa Kosak, Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881–1905 (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 68. 9. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1977), 381. 10. François Weil, A History of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 17; Tobier, “Manhattan’s Business District,” 86. 11. Weil, A History of New York, 183. 12. Tobier, “Manhattan’s Business District,” 98. 13. Ibid., 87–88. 14. Frederick M. Binder and David M Reimers, All the Nations under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 48. 15. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1111. 16. Binder and Reimers, All the Nations under Heaven, 114–15, 136. 17. Ibid., 120–21; Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 104. 18. David Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 100. While labor historian Montgomery limits his use of the concept of sedentary communities to dock workers, I am extending it to the broad pattern in New York City, where white ethnics had considerable control of the local labor markets, which were both labor intensive and rooted in their community life. 19. Kosak, Cultures of Opposition, 68. 20. Ibid., 107. 21. Ibid., 108. 22. Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 143. 23. Nelson, Divided We Stand, 39; Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 200–01. 24. Risa L. Faussette, “Race, Migration, and Port City Radicalism: New York’s Black Longshoremen and the Politics of Maritime Protest” (Ph.D. diss., Binghamton University, 2002), 223–24; Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 100. In some cases, blacks obtained jobs through their friendships with whites. As Jake Govan remembered, “there was this Italian fellow we knew over here [in Corona] who became the foreman. So he got us all jobs over there.” Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and

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the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 28. 25. Wilder, A Covenant with Color, 142. 26. New York Urban League Study 1935 (hereafter NYULS), 11–12, folder: Affiliates file, Department of Industrial Relations, box 32, National Urban League Records (NUL), Part 1, series D, Collections of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (LC). 27. “Negro Labor Making Good: Business Men Who Hire Both Races Speak Highly of Their Colored Employees,” New York Age, August 23, 1917, 1. 28. New York Urban League (NYUL), Bulletin NYUL, A Year of Service, Report 1919, (January 1920), 3–5. 29. NYUL, NYUL, Report 1920 3, no. 1 (January 1921), 6–8; NYUL, Bulletin, NYUL, Annual Report 1921, 3–5; NYUL, Bulletin of NYUL, Annual Report and List of Contributors 1923 (1924), 9. 30. NYUL, NYUL Annual Report 1925 (1926), 8. 31. NYUL “A Challenge to New York,” Annual Report, Year 1927 (1928), 14, 17. 32. Alice Brown Fairclough, “A Study of Occupational Opportunities for Negro Women in New York” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1929), 56; and Toure F. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 62. 33. Langston Hughes, Autobiography: The Big Sea, in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, ed. Joseph Mc Lauren (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 13:86. 34. “Industrial Problems in Cities,” Opportunity, February 1926, 68. 35. Fairclough, A Study of Occupational Opportunities, 47. 36. Ruth Edmonds Hill, ed., The Black Women Oral History Project (Westport, CT, and London: Meckler, 1991), 8:127. 37. Clyde Vernon Kiser, Sea Island to the City: A Study of St. Helena Islanders in Harlem and Other Urban Centers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 186. 38. Winston James, “Explaining Afro-Caribbean Social Mobility in the United States: Beyond the Sowell Thesis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 2 (2002): 226–27, 246. Between 1899 and 1931, 37.9 percent of Afro-Caribbean workers were skilled (averaging 35.6 percent from 1899 to 1905, and rising to 52. 4 percent from 1927 to 1931). 39. Jessie Clark and Gertrude E. McDougald, A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker: A Study of Colored Women in Industry in New York City (New York: C. P. Young, 1919), 13. 40. Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 281. 41. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, State Compendium New York, Statistics of Population, Occupations, Agriculture, Manufactures, and Mines and Quaries for the State, Counties, and Cities (Washington, D C: Government Printing Office, 1924), 193; Fifteenth Census of the United States,

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Manufactures: 1929, Report by States, Statistics for Industrial Area Counties, and Cities (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933), 3: 372. 42. Herbert R. Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944), 122. 43. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920, vol. 4; U.S. Burea of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, 4: 1141. The expansion of Manhattan’s commercial sector spawned the 1920s construction boom. Between 1920 and 1930, black employment as common laborers in building construction increased from 1,245 to 2,256. Blacks usually entered construction as strikebreakers, and as they threatened trade unions, they often gained union membership. As manufacturers in the city began to rely on trucks to transport supplies and commodities, blacks found jobs as drivers and garage laborers. In 1910, 16.1 percent of black men worked in the transportation sector. According to the 1920 census, 1,518 black men were employed as chauffeurs and eighteen men as garage keepers and managers. By 1930, 5,438 worked as chauffeurs and truck and tractor drivers and 1,178 as garage laborers. Black workers, however, lost ground in longshore work: in 1920, 3,876 black workers toiled on the docks, while a decade later only 2,365 obtained the same employment. Although growth in the automobile industry and the construction boom created greater employment opportunities for black workers, the majority of blacks still worked at menial positions. 44. James Grossman, Land of Hope: Black Southerners and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 184. A considerable portion of the black male population found industrial jobs in midsize urban northern cities, Milwaukee (71 percent in 1920 and 79.6 in 1930) and Cleveland (63.2 in 1920). Joe W. Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 47; Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 57. 45. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Labor, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 140. 46. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of United States, 1920, 4: 1172; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, 4: 1142. While redcaps and sleeping car porters earned greater wages and were considered part of the respectable class, the majority of porters worked in stores, not on the trains or in the rail road terminals. There were three classifications for porters: domestic and personal service (4,860), Steam Railroad (3,038) and All other porters (3,747). 47. Washington, A Study of Employees, 18–19. 48. Ibid., 19. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 17. 51. Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 270; George Schuyler, Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1966), 105.

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52. Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 40. 53. Nelson, Divided We Stand, 4. 54. The quotation is from Kiser, Sea Island to City, 259; Charles S. Johnson, “Black Workers and the City,” Survey Graphic: Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, 6, no. 6 (March 1925): 643. 55. Faussette, “Race, Migration, and Port City Radicalism,” 241. 56. Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 201. 57. “Industrial Problem in the Cities,” Opportunity, February 1926, 68. 58. Jones, Labor of Love, 139. 59. Clark and McDougald, A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker, 5. 60. Eugene Kinckle Jones, “Negro Migration in New York State,” Opportunity, January 1926, 8. 61. Fairclough, A Study of Occupational Opportunities, 16. 62. Robert M. Fogelson and Richard E. Rubenstein, Mass Violence in America: The Complete Report of Mayor LaGuardia’s Commission on the Harlem Riot of March 19, 1935 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), 30. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920, 4, table 12, 4: 367; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United Sates, 1930, 4 table 16, 4: 108, and table 16, 4: 298; and Jones, Labor of Love, 140. According to the 1920 census, 37 percent of white women and 32.5 percent of white immigrant women worked in the city. For the same year, 60 percent of Manhattan’s black female population was employed, while 44 percent toiled in Chicago and 33.5 in Detroit. A decade later, 37.8 percent and 35.8 percent of native and immigrant white women and 58.3 percent of black women worked in Manhattan; in Chicago and Detroit, approximately 41 percent and 32 percent of black women were employed. In Manhattan, 51 percent of married black women worked, whereas 16.4 percent of white native and 13.8 percent of immigrant women were gainfully employed. For Chicago and Detroit, 38.9 and 26.9 of married black women were employed, respectively. 63. Elizabeth Ross Haynes, “Negroes in Domestic Service in the United States,” 427. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of United States, 1910, vol. 4; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920, vol. 4; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of United States, 1930, vol. 4. Black women also obtained employment in commercial laundries. In 1910, 3,244 black laundresses worked outside the factory in 1920, 2,530; and in 1930, 1,351. In 1910, there were 518 laundry operatives, 946 in 1920, and 4,772 in 1930. The decline in black laundresses indicated black women’s incorporation into laundries as laundry operatives, though many black women probably washed clothes occasionally in their homes to supplement their wages. 64. Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 217. 65. May Edward Chinn, Black Women Oral History Project, 461.

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66. “Hairdressers Head Business List,” Chicago Defender, November 2, 1918, 5. For black beauticians and the labor and political activism of Randolph and other beauticians, see Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 51–53. 67. Fairclough, A Study of Occupational Opportunities, 19. 68. Clark and McDougald, A New Day for the Colored Woman, 15. 69. Fairclough, A Study of Occupational Opportunities, 42. 70. Clark and McDougald, A New Day for the Colored Woman, 17. 71. Ibid., 18–19. 72. Fairclough, A Study of Occupational Opportunities, 42. After the Great War, of 2,185 black female industrial workers, half received less than ten dollars per week, a third received exactly ten dollars, and 76 percent received between eight and twelve dollars per week. By the late twenties, the average wage for black women employed in the domestic and personal service sector was $16.45 per week. The majority of garment workers, finishers, earned between ten and twenty-two dollars per week. 73. Clark and McDougald, A New Day for the Colored Woman, 19–20. 74. David McBride, “The Black-White Mortality Differential in New York State, 1900–1950: A Socio-Historical Reconsideration,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 14, no. 2 (1990): 81. 75. Fairclough, A Study of Occupational Opportunities, 46, 15; Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940 (Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). 76. Clark and McDougald, A New Day for the Colored Woman, 11. 77. Elise Johnson McDougald, “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,” Survey Graphic: Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro 6, no. 6 (March 1925): 690. 78. Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist, 184. 79. Ibid., 185. 80. Labor Union Survey, Number 368, NUL, Series 6, box 88, folder: Early Surveys: Labor Union Questionnaire, New York City, 1925–26 (hereafter Early Surveys), LC. 81. Labor Union Survey, Number 400, Early Surveys. 82. Experiences of I. F. Johnson, Brooklyn, NY, September 7, 1925, 2, NUL, Part 1, Series 4, box 4, Miscellany, LC. 83. Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist, 251. 84. Clark and McDougald, A New Day for the Colored Woman, 24. 85. Labor Union Survey, Number 358, Early Surveys. 86. Fairclough, A Study of Occupational Opportunities, 44; Clark and McDougald, A New Day for the Colored Woman, 24. 87. Fausette, “Race, Migration, and Port City Radicalism,” 230. 88. Ibid., 231. 89. Ibid., 239. 90. Ibid., 237 91. Ibid., 239, 240.

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92. Ibid., 240. 93. Ibid., 242. 94. Ibid. 95. Labor Union Survey, Number 400, Early Surveys. 96. Memorandum, July 23, 1920, 2, GEHP, box 1, folder: Conference Study: Russell Sage Foundation Building Employees, 1920, SCRBC. 97. Elise Johnson McDougald, “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,” Survey Graphic: Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro 6, no. 6 (March 1925): 690. 98. Memorandum, June 22, 1920, GEHP, SCRBC. 99. Memorandum, from Miss Van Kleeck to Mr. Glenn, August 3, 1920, 3, GEHP, SCRBC. 100. Memorandum, August 6, 1920, GEHP, SCRBC. 101. Memorandum for Meeting of Building Employees, July 8, 1920, GEHP, SCRBC. 102. Memorandum, August 3, 1920, GEHP, SCRBC. 103. Memorandum, September 10, 1920, GEHP, SCRBC. 104. “200 Colored Employe[e]s Strike when Waitress Is Fired for Courtesy Shown to Race Patron,” New York Age, October 2, 1926, 1. 105. Ibid. 106. Charles S. Johnson, “Negro Workers and the Unions,” in The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present, vol. 6, The Era of Post-War Prosperity and the Great Depression, 1920–1936, eds. Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 530. 107. Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist of New York, 216–18. 108. Ibid., 249–50. 109. Ibid., 195. 110. Ira A. Reid, Negro Membership in American Labor Unions (New York: National Urban League, 1930), 73. 111. Reid, Negro Membership, 86. 112. Federal Employees Union, Number 4, Early Surveys. 113. Labor Union Survey, Number 385, Early Surveys. 114. Eric Arnesen, “Following the Color Line: Black Workers and the Labor Movement before 1950,” Radical History Review 55 (1993): 58. 115. Labor Union Survey, Number 360. Early Surveys: Labor Union Questionnaire, New York City, 1925–26. The International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was an exception. According to Spero and Harris, the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America invited black workers because they were industrial unions, and “their outlook is not limited to the narrow concept of job control which dominates most of the A. F. L. unions. They are moved instead by a broad social philosophy which looks to the ultimate reorganization of society along socialistic lines.” Spero and Abrams, The Black Worker, 347. Black women were not “overtly discriminated against,” but they were not actively recruited until the mid-twenties,

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according to historian Dana Christine Massing. Their presence was also comparatively small in relationship to white ethnic immigrants. Italian women, Spaniards, and the Portuguese—not black women—worked as the major strikebreaking element. Nevertheless, in the late 1920s Floria Pinkney, a black organizer, was hired to recruit black workers, and in 1929–1930, the ILGWU, in cooperation with the NAACP, YMCA, and the New York and Brooklyn Urban Leagues, had a membership drive. Dana Christine Massing, “Shoulder to Shoulder for a Common Cause?: Jewish, Italian, and Black Women Garment Workers in New York City” ( M.A. thesis, University of Alberta, 1995),144, 148. 116. Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist of New York, 190. 117. Ibid., 190. 118. Labor Union Survey, Number 368, Early Surveys. 119. Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist of New York, 253. 120. Ibid., 219. 121. Hubert Harrison, “The Negro and the Labor Unions,” Voice, August 1917, in Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. Jeffrey B. Perry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), 80. 122. James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, 122–184. 123. The Reminiscences of A. Philip Randolph (Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 1962), 219. 124. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 391. 125. Ibid., 223. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., 394. 128. The Reminiscences of A. Philip Randolph, 228. For more on Randolph, see William H. Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925–37 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Beth T. Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Eric Arnesen, “A. Philip Randolph: Labor and the New Black Politics,” in The Human Tradition in American Labor History, ed. Eric Arnesen (Lanham, MD: Row and Littlefield Publishers, 2004); Cornelius Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); and Andrew E. Kersten and Clarence Lang, Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015). NLUCAN, Report of the Director, for June, July, August, and to September 22, 1913, 7, NUL, Part 1, Series 11, box 1, folder: Executive Board, June–December 1913, LC. 129. National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, Report of the Director, for June, July, August, and to September 22, 1913, 7, box 1, folder: Executive Board, June–December 1913, NUL, vol. 1, series 11. 130. “Hon. Samuel Gompers, President American Federation of Labor, Washington, D.C., 1918,” in The Black Worker, eds. Foner and Lewis, 422–24.

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131. Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist of New York, 303. In 1923, Randolph proposed the formation of a central body for black workers called the United Negro Trades. See Spero and Abrams, The Black Worker, 396. 132. Arnesen, “Specter of the Black Strike Breaker,” 319–35; Brian Kelly, “Sentinels for the New South Industry”; Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in Alabama Coalfields; Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It; Phillips, AlabamaNorth. Chicago’s AME Bishop Archibald J. Carey exclaimed, “the interest of my people lies with the wealth of the nation and with the class of white people who control it.” According to historian James Grossman, industrial magnates—Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, Cyrus McCormick, H. H. Kohlsaat, and George Pullman—“rescued Carey’s Quinn Chapel from foreclosure.” Grossman, Land of Hope, 230. 133. T. Arnold Hill, “The Negro in Industry,” in The Black Worker, eds. Foner and Lewis, 522. 134. NUL, Vol. 1. Series 4, box 8, folder: Trade Union Committee For Organizing Negro Workers, 1925, 1. 135. Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers (TUCONW), Minutes of Conference Held May 23rd at Arlington Hall, 12 St. Mark’s Place, New York City, Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers, 1, Negro Labor Committee Records (NLCR), 1925–1969, SCRBC. 136. Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist of New York, 101–2. 137. TUCONW, Letter from Thomas Curtis to Trade Unions, undated, 1, NLCR, SCRBC. 138. Minutes of Conference, 2. 139. Louis J. Parascandola, ed., “Look for Me All Around You”: Anglophone Caribbean Immigrants in the Harlem Renaissance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 184. 140. TUCONW, Letter from Crosswaith to American Fund for Public Service, June 19, 1925, 2, NLCR, SCRBC. 141. Ibid. 142. TUCONW, Report to the Executive Committee, November 14, 1925, 1, NLCR, SCRBC. 143. TUCONW, Frank Crosswaith to American Fund for Public Services, January 14, 1926, 1, NLCR, SCRBC. For explanations for the demise of the Trade Union Committee, see John C. Walter, “Frank R. Crosswaith and the Negro Labor Committee in Harlem, 1925–1939,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 3, no.2 (July 1979). 144. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to Mr. Frank R. Crosswaith, the American Fund for Public Service, Inc., January 25, 1926, 1, NLCR, SCRBC. 145. Frank Crosswaith to Miss Elizabeth G. Flynn, TUCONW, February 3, 1926, 2, NLCR, SCRBC. 146. William Green, “Our Negro Worker,” Messenger, September, 1925, 7; William Green, “Negro Wage Earners,” in The Black Worker, eds. Foner and Lewis. 147. Frank Crosswaith to Miss Elizabeth G. Flynn, TUCO NW, February 3, 1926, 2, NLCR, SCRBC.

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148. Letter to Mr. Hugh Frayne, February 1926, in The Black Worker, eds. Foner and Lewis, 318–19. 149. William Green, “Why Belong to the Union?” Opportunity, February, 1926, 61–64; “Admission to Labor Unions a Farce, National Urban League Report Shows,” New York Amsterdam News, February 10, 1926, 3; and “Interesting Events Feature Fifteenth Annual Conference of National Urban League Workers Held in New York City,” New York Age, February 13, 1926, 1, 2. 150. “Union Heads May Appoint Negro,” New York Amsterdam News, March 31, 1926, 12; and “A. F. of L. Council Asked To Aid Negro Workers with Unions,” New York Age, April 3, 1926, 3. 151. Elizabeth G. Flynn to Mr. Frank Crosswaith, February 11, 1926; Frank Crosswaith to Miss Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, May 6, 1926; Frank R. Crosswaith to Mr. Morris L. Ernst, June 5, 1926, NLCR, SCRBC. 152. Historian John Howard Seabrook claims that Crosswaith’s commitment to Randolph and the brotherhood “was the real death blow to TUC.” Seabrook correctly highlights the attraction of the brotherhood, but underestimates the effects of racism among white workers and unions, the overall rejection of the labor movement, particularly the AFL, and Crosswaith’s visions of an all-black labor movement. John Howard Seabrook, Black and White Unite: The Career of Frank Crosswaith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1980), 75. Here, I am arguing that Crosswaith’s experiences with the labor movement and his early work with the BSCP influenced how he and other black leaders began to understand the importance of anchoring labor power in the black community. As Bates explains regarding Randolph, as a result of the thwarted 1928 strike, “the strike issue emphasized to the Brotherhood that while it did not have the power to pull off a strike, its movement would ‘rest upon its power solely’ with the porters, Citizen’s Committee, and networks in the community.” Bates, Pullman Porters, 99–100. 153. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1967), 71–83. Harold Cruse also examines the black projectionists strike. Cruse argues that the black radicals (what I call here New Negro activists), and the black bourgeois, the black weeklies, failed to address “property relations in Harlem between black and white.” He also claims that black bourgeois leadership failed to employ the boycott because of its “class disabilities.” Articles from the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News show that the black weeklies did threaten a boycott. Yet here Cruse is partly correct. The black weeklies did not, as he argues, “fully appreciate . . . the impact of the developing American cultural apparatus on the economics, the politics . . . of the black community.” Cruse and I depart on focus, as well as the significance of the strike. More specifically, this section focuses on the labor issue. I interpret blacks’ full attendance to the Lafayette’s shows as a demonstration of black working-class oppositional consciousness and resistance to both the racism of white labor unions and perhaps more “respectable” forms of black theater; future scholarship might fully substantiate this latter point, however. As Cruse admits, the Lafayette was the leading black vaudeville center in Harlem since 1913. Furthermore,

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the 1926 strike overlaps with the invasion of slumming whites to Harlem’s night spots. In this context, theaters and Harlem residential spaces become critical sites of cultural conflict and autonomy. It is here, as I argue in chapter 1 and develop further in chapter 4, that blacks begin to take up the question of property relations. 154. Reid, Negro Membership on American Labor Unions, 96. 155. TUCONW, Letter to American Fund for Public Service, June 19, 1925, 2. NLCR, SCRBC. 156. Ibid. 157. Letter to Mr. Thomas Johnson from I.A.T.S.E. and M P. M. O., 324 West 42nd Street, April 7, 1926, NUL, Vol. 1. Series 6, box 88, folder: Labor Unions Survey Union Questionnaire New York City, 1925–26, LC; Reid, Negro Membership in American Labor Unions, 97. 158. New York Amsterdam News, April 21, 1926; Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist of New York, 252–53. 159. New York Amsterdam News, July 1, 1925. 160. “Harlem Movie Houses Ignore Request for Colored Operators,” New York Age, March 6, 1926, 6. 161. New York Amsterdam News, April 7, 1926, 5. 162. TUCONW, Report to the Executive Board, Covering the History of the Committee for Month of June, 2, NLCR, SCRBC. 163. Ibid. 164. New York Amsterdam News, July 1, 1925. 165. New York Age, March 6, 1926. 166. New York Amsterdam News, March 3, 1926; “Harlem Movie Houses Ignore Request,” 6. 167. “New Management Takes Reins at the Douglas and Roosevelt Houses,” New York Amsterdam News, March 3, 1926. 168. Ibid., March 31, 1926. 169. Ibid., May 12, 1926. 170. Ibid., November 10, 1926. 171. Ibid., June 23, 1926, 6. 172. Ibid. 173. Ibid., July 14, 1926, 10; July 28, 1926, 11. 174. Ibid., September 22, 1926, 10. 175. Ibid., September 15, 1926, 11. 176. Ibid. 177. Ibid. 178. Ibid., September 22, 1926, 10. 179. Ibid. 180. “Schiffman Offers to Put Union Men in Lafayette,” New York Amsterdam News, October 6, 1926, 10. 181. Ibid. 182. “The Battle Rages,” New York Amsterdam News, October 6, 1926, 10.

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183. New York Amsterdam News, October 13, 1926, 10; New York Age, October 16, 1926, 6. 184. New York Amsterdam News, October 13, 1926, 10. 185. Ibid., October 27, 1926. 186. Ibid., November 10, 1926, 10. 187. Hubert Harrison, “As Harrison Sees It,” New York Amsterdam News, October 6, 1926, 11. 188. Ibid. 189. Ibid. 190. Ibid. 191. “Negro Union Motion Picture Operators Again at Lafayette at Union Wages” New York Amsterdam News, June 8, 1927, 11. 192. Harrison, “As Harrison Sees It,” 11. 193. Walter White “Solving America’s Race Problem,” Nation 128 (January 1929): 42. 194. “Union Leader Heckled on Reluctance of Body to Admit Porters’ Brotherhood,” New York Amsterdam News, July 3, 1929, 3; A. Philip Randolph, “Harlem Audience Frowned on Hecklers of William Green ” New York Amsterdam News, July 17, 1929, 20; Elmer Anderson Carter, “The A.F. of L and the Negro,” Opportunity, November 1929, 335; William Green, “Correspondence,” Opportunity, December 1929, 381–82; Elmer Anderson Carter, “President of The A. F. of L Replies,” Opportunity, December 1929, 367. 195. “In 211 Harlem Stores Only 129 Colored Workers Are Employed, and Employers Say Patrons Don’t Want Negro Clerks,” New York Age, December 4, 1926, 1. Also see New York Age, November 20, 27, 1926.

Chapter 3. “Colored People Have Few Places to Which They Can Move” 1. Joyce Moore Turner and W. Burghardt Turner, Richard B. Moore: Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings, 1920–1972 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 150. 2. Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 15. The movement throughout New York City was contemporaneous with African Americans’ movement within the U. S. South and to the Northeast and Midwest. Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (New York: Russell and Russell, 1918); Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1976); Dennis C. Dickerson, Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875–1980 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1986); Elizabeth H. Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865–1900 (New York: Academic Press, 1979); James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Elizabeth Rauel Bethel, Promiseland: A Century of Life in a Negro Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).

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3. Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 16; Osofsky, Harlem, 11; and Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911), 33. 4. Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 24 and 29. 5. Ibid. 6. Osofsky, Harlem, 13. In the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jamaican tenant farmers also endured high rents. Although tenant-planter relationships in the Caribbean were exponentially different from tenant-relationship in Harlem, migrants’ experiences as exploited tenants provided them with a basis to understand their injustice when they confronted it. Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People 1880–1902: Race, Class and Social Control (Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press), 136. 7. Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 31. 8. Ibid., 28. 9. Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 95. 10. NYUL, Twenty-Four Hundred Negro Families: An Interpretation of the Living Conditions of Small Wage Earners (May 1927), 12, SCRBC. 11. T. J. Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities (College Park, MD: McGrath Publishing, 1969),) 78, 86. 12. NYUL, Twenty-Four Hundred Negro Families, 3. 13. Ibid., 15. 14. Ibid., 13. 15. Ibid., 17. 16. Ibid., 18. 17. Ibid., 16. 18. Ibid., 17. 19. Ibid. 20. Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities, 124; NYUL, Twenty-Four Hundred Negro Families, 19; James Ford, Slums and Housing: History, Conditions, Policy (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1936), 1: 326. 21. Louise Venable Kennedy, Negro Peasant Turns Cityward: Effects of Recent Migrations to Northern Centers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 164. 22. NYUL, Twenty-Four Hundred Negro Families, 5; and Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities, 87. 23. Ford, Slums and Housing, 329. 24. “Fight Against Raised Rents,” New York Age, October 5, 1916, 1. 25. The NCIL was established between the 1914 and 1915. It was composed of “Harlem men,” according to the NLUCAN, to reduce rents in apartment buildings. Bulletin of National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes: Report 1915–1916, Announcement 1916–1917 6, no. 4 (November 1916): 13. 26. “Tenants Hold Mass Meeting,” New York Age, October 5, 1916, 1. 27. NYUL, Twenty-Four Hundred Negro Families, 7. 28. New York Age, September 28, 1916, 2.

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29. “Fight against Raised Rents,” New York Age, October 5, 1916, 1. 30. “Tenants Hold Mass Meeting,” New York Age, October 12, 1916, 1 (my emphasis). 31. Ibid. 32. See Elsa Barkely Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” in Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, eds. Charles M. Payne and Adam Green (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 68–110. 33. “Harlem Agents Raising Rents,” New York Age, November 23, 1916, 1. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. The Sunday after the first mass meeting, Reverend Frank Hyder, of St. James Presbyterian Church, with the attendance of the 143rd Street NA, delivered a speech called “Harlem’s High House Rent and How to Handle It.” “The Question of High Rents,” New York Age, December 21, 1916, 2. 39. “High Rentals’ Meetings Warm,” New York Age, December 28, 1916, 1. 40. Ibid. 41. Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” 81–93; Julie A. Gallager, Black Women and Politics in New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 37–39; Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 56–68. 42. Quotation from Day, Urban Castles, 134; Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post–World War I Housing Crisis,” in The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984, ed. Ronald Lawson, with Mark Naison (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 51, 72–75. 43. New York Amsterdam News, January 13, 1926, 1; August 12, 1925, 12. 44. NYUL, Report 1920, 12–13. 45. “Landlords Exploit Colored Tenants: But Harlem Rent-Payers Get Many Reductions through the Courts,” New York Times, July 27, 1924, 1. 46. New York Amsterdam News, September 12, 1923, 1. 47. Anna J. Robinson, “Legal Talk,” New York Amsterdam News, July 25, 1923, 12. 48. Anna J. Robinson, “On Going to Court,” New York Amsterdam News, October 24, 1923, 9. 49. Anna J. Robinson, “Legal Talks, Hot Water,” New York Amsterdam News, October 31, 1923, 12. 50. Anna J. Robinson, “Emergency Rent Laws, Legal Talks,” New York Amsterdam News, August 29, 1923, 12. 51. Ibid. 52. Anna J. Robinson, “Protect Your Interests,” New York Amsterdam News, September 19, 1923, 12; “The Election, an Editorial,” New York Amsterdam News, October 31, 1923, 1.

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53. Osofsky, Harlem, 141. 54. “Harlem Landlord Sent to Jail,” New York Amsterdam News, May 16, 1923, 1. 55. “Gave Him $200 to Make Noise, Tenant Claims,” New York Amsterdam News, February 24, 1926, 12. 56. “Clique Framed up on Bailey.” New York Amsterdam News, September 9, 1923, 1. 57. “Royall Boosted Rent $85,” New York Amsterdam News, October 31, 1923, 1, 3. 58. “Scores Secure Rent Reductions,” New York Amsterdam News, February 25, 1925, 9. 59. “Landlord Takes Quick Action on Tenants’ Plaint,” New York Age, July 28, 1928, 10. 60. “Tenants Have Landlord Held,” New York Amsterdam News, January 13, 1926, 1. 61. “25 Babies Found in Heatless Flat,” New York Amsterdam News, January 20, 1926, 1. 62. “Hot Water Must Be Supplied [to] Tenants,” New York Amsterdam News, November 11, 1925, 9. 63. Day, Urban Castes, 148. 64. “Harlem Lessee Gets Record Fine,” New York Amsterdam News, February 3, 1926, 12. 65. Ibid. 66. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post–World War I Housing Crisis,” 84. 67. Edith Berger Drellich and Andree Emery, Rent Control in War and Peace (New York: National Municipal League), 60. 68. “Grenthal Interested in Harlem Tenants,” New York Amsterdam News, November 4, 1925, 2. 69. “White Voters Vote White,” New York Amsterdam News, November 11, 1925, 16. 70. “Election Aftermaths,” New York Amsterdam News, November 10, 1926, 20. 71. “Vote Black,” New York Amsterdam News, November 2, 1927, 20. 72. “Queer Doings in 19th A.D.,” New York Amsterdam News, March 14, 1928, 20. 73. “Unscrupulous Methods Used in 19th A.D. Are Stirring District Voters to Revolt,” New York Age, August 18, 1928, 1. 74. “Former Leader David. B. Costuma’s Position on 19th A.D. Leadership,” New York Age, August 18, 1928, 1; and “In 19th A.D.,” 1. 75. Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Winston James, Holding the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1998); Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communism and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). 76. Richard B. Moore, “Housing and the Negro Masses,” in “Look for Me All around You”: Anglophone Caribbean Immigrants in the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Louis J. Parascandola (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 238.

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77. “Office Seekers Clash at Tenants’ Body Meet,” New York Amsterdam News, October 17, 1928, 3; and “Tenants to Demand Renewal of Rent Laws through Albany Delegates,” New York Amsterdam News, January 16, 1929, 3. 78. Sol Auerbach, “A Block in Harlem—Flimsy, Disease-Festering, Common Toilets, Robber Landlords: Blind Negro Worker Making Only $10 a Week Pays $35 for Rooms,” Daily Worker, April 9, 1929, 1. 79. Ibid., 3. 80. Ibid. 81. Sol Auerbach, “Republican Politician Robs Negro Tenants of ‘Higher Class’ Harlem Apartments: Vermin-Infested Rooms, Dumbwaiters that Don’t Work, High Rents,” Daily Worker, April 10, 1929, 1. 82. Ibid., 4. 83. Richard B. Moore, “Tenants Urged to Organize against Tenement System: President of Harlem Tenants League Says Only Mass Action Can Be Effective,” Daily Worker, April 15, 1929, 1; Irma Watkins Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 106; Naison, “Tenant Activism in the Great Depression,” 97; and Burghardt and Turner, Richard B. Moore, 150. 84. “Tenants Parade Today against Rent Slavery,” Daily Worker, June 1, 1929, 1; and “Tenants Protest against Housing: Renters’ League Parades and Denounces Harlem Landlords,” New York Amsterdam News, June 5, 1929, 1. 85. “Thousands Hail Mass Protest of Harlem Tenants: Parade, Slogans Are Cheered during March Thru Center,” Daily Worker, June 3, 1929, 5. 86. Ibid., and “Tenants Protest against Housing,” 2. 87. New York Amsterdam News, June 12, 1929, 3. 88. “Harlem Tenants Demand Cut Rent: Big Meeting Scores the Landlord’s Rapacity,” Daily Worker, June 11, 1929, 5. 89. “Tammany Pass Fake Rent Law To Dupe Tenants: Wants Votes; Tenants League Bares Fraud,” Daily Worker, June 12, 1929, 1. 90. Naison, “Tenant Activism in the Great Depression,” 98; New York Amsterdam News, June 19, 1929, 1; New York Amsterdam News, June 12, 1929, 1. 91. Naison, “Tenant Activism in the Great Depression,” 98. 92. “Rent Law Amended To Suit Owners: Applies Only to Apartments Renting at $15 or Less per Room,” New York Amsterdam News, June 19, 1929, 1; “League of Tenants Sponsoring Parley; Renters to Discuss Housing Situation Here Two Days,” New York Amsterdam News, July 31, 1929, 11. 93. Solomon Harper, “The Harlem Press Gags the Mass Protest of Tenants,” Daily Worker, June 3, 1929, 1 and 3. 94. “Principal Contest on in Nineteenth Assembly District,” New York Amsterdam News, September 11, 1929, 2. 95. “May Oust Grenthal,” New York Amsterdam News, June 19, 1929, 3. 96. “Rivers Would Force Repairs by Bill,” New York Amsterdam News, January 15, 1930, 1.

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97. Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 112–36.

Chapter 4. “Maintaining ‘a High Class of Respectability’ in Negro Neighborhoods” 1. “Too Many Saloons in Harlem,” New York Age, October 1, 1914; for buffet flats, see Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 107; Roi Ottley, “New World A-Coming”: Inside of Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943), 63. 2. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 160–61. 3. For scholarship on vice in the urban North, especially New York City, see Shane White, Stephan Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Elizabeth A. Clement, Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts: Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). For Chicago and Detroit, see Cynthia M. Blair, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-theCentury Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 4. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 161. 5. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 90. 6. Michelle Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 141–72. During the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some black men believed that black women’s club work precluded them from being a “‘keeper at home.’” Accordingly, such club work might render “marriage distasteful and repulsive” to such men. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 64. For a discursive history of patriarchy, race motherhood, and New Negro feminism, see Erin D. Chapman, Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 7. This chapter seeks to address, as Darlene Clark Hine puts it, “the connection between migration and social-class formation and the rise of protest ideologies which shaped the consciousness of the ‘New Negro.’” Darlene Clark Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915–1945,” in The Great Migration in

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Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, ed. Joe Trotter, Jr. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 129. 8. Heap, Slumming, 26. 9. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992), 209. 10. Heap, Slumming, 37. 11. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 306. 12. For the transition from brothels to tenement-house prostitution, see Mumford, Interzones, 21–26, and Clement, Love for Sale, 89–113. Comparing black and white women, Clement states, “If at the turn of the century black prostitutes worked mostly out of tenements and bars, by 1910 most of their white counterparts had followed suit.” Love for Sale, 86. 13. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Black North in 1901: A Social Study (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 13. 14. George Edmund Haynes, The Negro at Work in New York City (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968); the percentages are on page 61 and quotation is on page 89. 15. Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911), 148. 16. Hicks, Talk With You Like a Woman, 29–31. 17. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 81. 18. Adam Clayton Powell, Against the Tide: An Autobiography (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938), 55. 19. Ibid. 56. 20. Buffet flats were leisure places where patrons could stay overnight to enjoy “illicit pleasures.” Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 107; Roi Ottley, “New World A-Coming”: Inside of Black America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943), 63. 21. Powell, Against the Tide, 57. 22. “Dragging the Race Down,” New York Age, June 9, 1910, 4. 23. “Clean ’Em Out,” New York Age, April 6, 1911, 4. 24. “Clean ’Em Out No.2,” New York Age, April 13, 1911, 4. 25. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman, 91–110; Clement, Love for Sale, 85. 26. “Harlem Liquor Conditions,” New York Age, April 27, 1916, 1–2. 27. “Saloon’s Back Room Trade,” New York Age, May 11, 1916, 1. 28. Ibid. 29. “Buffet Flats’ Development,” New York Age, May 25, 1916, 1. 30. “Barrel Houses and Buffet Flats,” New York Age, May 4, 1916, 1–2. 31. “Negro Saloon Man’s Case,” New York Age, May 18, 1916, 1. 32. “The Cabaret as Seen in Harlem,” New York Age, June 1, 1916, 1.

220

| Notes

33. Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 96. 34. Thomas C. Mackey, Pursuing Johns: Criminal Law Reform, Defending Character, and New York City’s Committee of Fourteen, 1920–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); Clement, Love for Sale. Quotations from the New York Age found in Powell, Against the Tide, 57; Frederick Whitin to Elizabeth Walton, 417 West 114th St., City, folder Urban League, box 15, Committee of Fourteen Records (COFR), Manuscript and Archives Section, New York Public Library. 35. Frederick Whitin to Elizabeth Walton, April 11, 1914, folder Urban League, box 15, COFR. 36. Mumford, Interzones, 23–26; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 239–43. 37. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body,” 23. 38. Ibid., 19. 39. Nation League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (NLUCAN), Housing Conditions among Negroes in Harlem, New York City 4, no. 2 (1915): 24. 40. Ibid., 23. 41. NLUCAN, Bulletin of National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes: Report 1913–14 and 1914–15, Announcement 1915–1916 5, no. 1 (November 1915): 19, 20. 42. Work in New York, folder: Executive Board, 1914, box 1, National Urban League Records (NUL), part. 1, series L, Collections of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (LC). 43. Eugene Kinckle Jones to Frederick H. Whitin, National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, November 23, 1915; Whitin to Eugene K. Jones, Committee of Fourteen, November 6, 1915, folder: Urban League, box 15, COFR. 44. For discussions about the COF ignoring prostitution in the black districts in New York City, see Mumford, Interzones, 47–49; Clement, Love for Sale, 80–85; and Stephen Robertson, “Harlem Undercover: Vice Investigators, Race, and Prostitution, 1910–1930,” Journal of Urban History 35, no. 4 (May 2009): 486–504. While Mumford and Clement argue that the COF ignored prostitution in the black community, Robertson, on the contrary, contends that the COF did address prostitution in the black community, but encountered difficulty because of the high demographic density of the black community by the early 1920s. 45. Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 130–133. 46. Edgar M. Grey, “Harlem after Dark,” New York Amsterdam News, April 6, 1927, 16. 47. Report of Investigation of Vice Conditions in Harlem, 6–7, folder: Urban League, box 15, COFR; A Brief Summary of Conclusions of Vice Conditions in Harlem, 4, folder: Harlem, box 82, COFR; Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1940), 117–18. 48. Lerner, Dry Manhattan, 201; Floyd Snelson, “When Harlem Started Fun,” New York Age, October 29, 1949.

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49. Heap, Slumming, 189–230; and Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, and Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 50. Langston Hughes, Autobiography: The Big Sea, in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, ed. Joseph Mc Lauren (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 176; Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 309–10. 51. Lewis, In Their Own Interests, 90. 52. Chase, “House Rent Parties,” 30. 53. “Ofay” is a disparaging term for a white person, used by black people. Fisher, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” 111 and 115. 54. Thurman, “Harlem Facets,” 37; Fisher, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” 115. 55. Fisher, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” 112. 56. I describe these spaces as semiprivate, since the police, non-state actors such as the Committee of Fourteen and the New York Urban League, as well as black tenants and landlords surveyed and complained about black homes. In “Disorderly Houses: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of Sexuality in 1920s Harlem,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 21, no. 3 (September 2012), historians Stephen Robertson, Shane White, Stephen Garton, and Graham White argue that blacks enjoyed privacy in residential spaces in Harlem because of the extended absences of residents, willingness of neighbors or lodgers to look away, limited surveillance, and the “ability to pass as married or as heterosexual.” First, Robertson et al. claim that scholars have not addressed black sexuality in private spaces. Several scholars have focused on buffet flats, residential prostitution, and premarital sexuality. See Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Clement, Love for Sale; and Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman. Second, they overstate the level of privacy that blacks enjoyed in Harlem and erase the various levels of surveillance and discipline blacks endured there. As this chapter demonstrates, not only did black tenants and landlords complain about black partygoers and prostitution, but they also, as a result of residential-based leisure, lacked the privacy they desired. At the same time, black buffet managers, landladies, and sex workers tried to hide their enterprises from the police, and especially white people. Blacks, therefore, did not take their privacy for granted. Finally, many nightclubs, owned and controlled by black and white proprietors, operated buffet flats. These black sex workers, in this sense, did not really have privacy, since these spaces were always mediated by managers. This does not preclude a measure of agency for black women, but it does call into question the level of privacy they could really have. Thus, while Robertson et al. make an important contribution in spotlighting different sexual behavior in Harlem residential spaces, they miss how these activities might disrupt privacy, ignore respectability politics among the black workingclass, minimalize the over-policing and arrest of black women, and neglect the compromising situation that black families in these residential spaces were placed in.

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| Notes

57. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman, 148–58. 58. Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1911), 156; Fairclough, “A Study of Occupational Opportunities,” 37–38. 59. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman, 217–19. I use the term “leisure work” to describe labor in the informal economy, such as that performed by madams and sex workers, as well as jobs in leisure institutions such as those performed by singers, dancers, waiters, bartenders, and others. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 48; Sharon Harley, “‘Working for Nothing but for a Living’: Black Women in the Underground Economy,” Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Wolcott, Remaking Respectability; and Blair, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’. 60. Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 22. 61. Boxes 35–37 of the Committee of Fourteen Records are designated as restricted; I have, therefore, changed the names of the individuals involved and replaced them with pseudonyms to protect their privacy. Commercial Amusement, Foot Lights Club, March 24, 1928, 1, folder: 1927–1929, box 35, COFR; Commercial Amusement, Greenleaf Melody Café, March 30, 1928, 1, folder: 107th–163rd Street, box 36, COFR. 62. Ibid. 63. A Brief Summary of Conclusions of Vice Conditions in Harlem, 3, folder: Harlem, box 82, COFR. For a discussion of black women’s responses to physical abuse in urban housing, see Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 127–28. 64. Robertson, “Harlem Undercover,” 494. 65. Ottley, “New World A-Coming,” 63; 6th Div., Tenement, 142 West 131st Street, February 25, 1928, 1, folder: 1927–1929, box 35, COFR. 66. 6th Div., Tenement, 40 West 131st, April 14, 1928, 1, folder: 1927–1929, box 35, COFR. 67 Ibid. 68. 6th Div., Tenement (Colored), 138 West 133rd Street, basement, July 25, 1928, 1, folder: 1927–1929, box 35, COFR. 69. Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982), 153; Willie Smith, with George Hoefer, Music on My Mind: The Memoirs of an American Pianist, foreword by Duke Ellington (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965), 152. 70. Bill Chase, “House Rent Parties,” New York Age, October 29, 1949, 30. 71. Duke Ellington, “My Hunt for Song Titles,” The Duke Ellington Reader (New York; Oxford University Press, 1993), 89. 72. Smith, Music on My Mind, 152. 73. Wallace Thurman, “Negro Life in New York’s Harlem: A Lively Picture of a Popular and Interesting Section,” in The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A

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Harlem Renaissance Reader, eds. Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2003), 53. 74. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–32 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), table 16, 179. 75. Anderson, This Was Harlem, 153. 76. Thurman, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman, 48. 77. Harley, “‘Working for Nothing but for a Living’: Black Women in the Underground Economy,” 59. 78. Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 320, 323, 79. Anderson, This Was Harlem, 155. 80. Scott Brown and Robert Hilbert, James P. Johnson: A Case of Mistaken Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1986), 145. 81. Corky Williams was a Harlem stride pianist who worked on the rent party circuit and at various night spots in Harlem. According to Maurice Waller and Anthony Calabrese, he specialized “in bawdy tunes like ‘The Boy in the Boat.’” Maurice Waller and Anthony Calabrese, Fats Waller (New York: Schirmer Books, 1977), 38; and Smith, Music on My Mind, 155. 82. Thurman, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman, 76. 83. Ibid. 84. Anderson, This Was Harlem, 154. 85. Ellington, “My Hunt for Song Titles,” 88 and 89. 86. To Mr. James H. Hubert, November 23, 1923, folder: Urban League, box 15, COFR. 87. Whitin to James H. Hubert, Committee of Fourteen, April 21, 1926, folder: Urban League, box 15, COFR. 88. Investigator E. D. Jones, 92 West 134 Street, Friday May 7, 1926, James H. Hubert to Frederick H. Whitin, New York Urban League, May 8, 1926, folder: Urban League, box 15, COFR. 89. Frederick H. Whitin to Mr. Jame H. Hubert, Executive Secretary, Committee of Fourteen, May 10, 1926, folder: Urban League, box 15, COFR. 90. As historian Jennifer Fronc argues, these reform organizations were “catalysts for social change” and their investigations were “central to the constitution of political authority and the extension of state power.” Fronc, New York Undercover, 7, 8. 91. Vechten, a socialite and writer, also created a significant portfolio of photographs of Harlem artists and entertainers, as well as serving as an advisor and sometime benefactor for many young writers and artists. Committee of Fourteen, Annual Report for 1926, New York 1927, 23, box 86, COFR. 92. Committee of Fourteen, Annual Report for 1928, 33, box 86, COFR; historian Khalil G. Muhammad makes a similar point about black urban space in general during this period. Khalil G. Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 227. 93. “Wants Negro Youth Sent to Churches,” New York Times, February 5, 1926, 2.

224 | Notes

94. Edgar M. Grey, “Harlem after Dark,” New York Amsterdam News, April 6, 1927, 16. 95. Edgar M. Grey, “The Devil’s Playground,” New York Amsterdam News, July 6, 1927, 12; “‘Black Belt’ Vice,” Opportunity, April 1923, 28. To refute claims of the immorality of the “black belt,” the Opportunity, the League’s journal, noted that “whites coming from outside and seeking comparative seclusion of Negro neighborhoods” were arrested in raids in both New York City and Chicago. 96. Grey, “The Devil’s Playground,” 12. 97. Grey, “Harlem after Dark,” 16. 98. “Critics Criticized,” New York Amsterdam News, July 18, 1928, 16. 99. Grey, “Harlem after Dark,” 16. 100. “Negroes Support Dance-Hall Policy,” New York Times, June 21, 1926, 5. See chapter 5 on the community’s views of the police. 101. Joint Committee on Negro Child Study in New York City, A Study of Delinquent and Neglected Negro Children: Before the New York City Children Court, 1927. 102. New York Amsterdam News, February 17, 1926. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid., February 24, 1926. 105. Ibid., October 24, 1928. 106. Letter from 2183 Fifth Avenue to the Committee of Fourteen, folder: Complaints of 1929, box 22, COFR. 107. Letter from 123 West 142nd Street to Committee of Fourteen, folder: Citizens Complaints, box 22, COFR. 108. Considering the initial conceptualization of the politics of respectability, it is important to consider Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s definition. When describing black Baptist women, she writes, “The Women’s Convention identified with the black working poor and opposed lower-class idleness and vice on the one hand and high society’s hedonism and materialism on the other.” Discussion and discipline around respectability, therefore, occurred within the working class, and even the working class criticized the black elite. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 187. For black working-class respectability in New York City, see Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman, especially chapters 1 and 6. For Detroit, see Wolcott’s Remaking Respectability. 109. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 161; “Rent Parties Are Menace,” New York Amsterdam News, October 28, 1925, 1; and “Man Shot with Sawed-Off Gun,” New York Amsterdam News, June 13, 1928, 1. 110. To Hon. Arthur Woods, Police Commissioner, New York City, folder: Citizens Complaints, box 22, COFR. 111. Letter from 123 West 142nd Street to Committee of Fourteen, folder: Citizens Complaints, box 22, COFR.

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112. “Blames Low Pay for Immorality,” New York Amsterdam News, February 12, 1930, 3; “They Won’t Keep Away,” New York Amsterdam News, October 23, 1929, 20. 113. Robertson, “Harlem Undercover,” 498, 499. 114. Minutes of Meeting of Joint Committee on Court and Prison Work among the Colored, folder: W 1926–32, May 23 and 29, June 13th, 1928, box 15, COFR; Robertson, “Harlem Undercover,” 499.

Chapter 5. “Demand the Dismissal of Policemen Who Abuse the Privileges of Their Uniform” 1. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 157. 2. See Toure F. Reed’s discussion of the Urban League’s and broadly black social workers’ intellectual connections to the Chicago School of Sociology, Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 19–26. 3. Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 16; Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of the Ghetto (New York: Elephant Paperback, 1996), 11; and Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1911), 33. The movement throughout New York City was contemporaneous with African Americans’ movement within the U. S. South and to the Northeast and Midwest. Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (New York: Russell and Russell, 1918); Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1976); Dennis C. Dickerson, Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875–1980 (New York: State University Press of New York Press, 1986); Elizabeth H. Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865–1900 (New York: Academic Press, 1979); James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1980); Elizabeth Rauel Bethel, Promiseland: A Century of Life in a Negro Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). 4. T. J. Woofter, Jr., ed., Negro Problems in Cities (College Park, MD: McGrath Publishing Company, 1969), 73; Osofsky, Harlem, 45. 5. Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 268. 6. Blacks’ violent encounters with the Irish during the nineteenth century exacerbated the tensions between blacks and the New York Police Department. The NYPD was not only predominately Irish, but also sided with the Irish against blacks in political, labor-related, and neighborhood conflict. In both the Draft Riots of 1863 and the race riot of 1900, it was often difficult to determine the difference between the repression of the Irish and of the police. 7. “Three Shot in Race Riot in West Sixteenth St” New York Times, July 10, 1905, 1; “Rioting between Whites and Blacks,” New York Age, July 13, 1905, 5. 8. “Three Shot in Race Riot,”1.

226 |

Notes

9. Ibid. 10. Faussette, “Race, Migration, and Port City Radicalism,” 39. 11. “McAdoo Explains Race Riots,” New York Age, July 20, 1905, 4. 12. “Black and White War in a Crowded District,” New York Times, July 15, 1905, 1. 13. Ibid. 14. “McAdoo Explains Race Riots,” 4. 15. “Another Race Riot Here,” New York Age, July 20, 1905, 1. 16. Ibid. 17. “After Brutal Policemen,” New York Age, July 27, 1905, 1. 18. “Race Rioters at It Again,” New York Times, July 18, 1905, 1; “After Brutal Policemen,” 1. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. “Police Accused of Inciting Race Riots,” New York Times, July 20, 1905, 12. 22. Ibid. 23. “McAdoo Explains Race Riots,” 4; July 20, 1905. 24. “Police Accused of Inciting Race Riots,” 12. 25. Ibid., July 20, 1905. 26. “Race Riot Inquiry On,” New York Times, July 21, 1905, 3. 27. “New Captain in Riot Zone,” New York Times, July 25, 1905, 12. 28. “Fierce Race Riot in Upper New York,” New York Times, December 26, 1901, 1. 29. Ibid. 30. “Police and People Ugly: Upper New York City in a State of Mind,” New York Age, July 11, 1907, 1; “Lets Raid Prisoners Go,” New York Times, June 17, 1907, 5. 31. “Police and People Ugly,” 1. 32. Marcy S. Sacks, Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 72–106. 33. “Race Riot Rages in Harlem Streets,” New York Times, August 5, 1907, 1. 34. “Race Riots in New York City,” New York Age, July 11, 1907, 4. 35. W. H. Brooks, “Outrages on Negroes: A Plea for a ‘Square Deal’ in Accordance with Manhood, not Color,” New York Times, June 3, 1906, 8. 36. “Ninety Police Out to Quell Negro Riot,” New York Times, July 31, 1909, 1; “Blacks Vent Rage on One Policeman,” New York Times, August 2, 1909, 14. 37. Ransom’s ideas about policing reflect a long history of African Americans’ expecting safety from crime and police accountability in cases of police misconduct. Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 261. Historian Muhammad writes, “The fact that some blacks in these communities stood to gain from a contradictory pattern of ineffective policing did not change the overall dilemma faced by the majority of residents, particularly self-identified working- and middle-class citizens who demanded that the guilty be punished and the innocent be protected.” 38. “Negro Police for New York,” New York Age, August 5, 1909, 1. 39. “The Trouble in Harlem,” New York Age, August 5, 1909, 4.

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40. “A Short Stop Used a Big ‘Mitt’ and Nearly Caused Riot,” Harlem Home News, April 28, 1911, 1. On July 4, 1910, Jack Johnson, the African American heavyweight champion, fought and defeated by technical knockdown ex-champion James J. Jeffries, a white American. Boxing promoters featured the boxing match, symbolic of interracial conflict, as the “Fight of the Century.” White boxing enthusiasts, especially, had hoped Jeffries might be their “great white hope” to defeat Johnson. For Jack Johnson, see Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts: Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3–18; Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and Theresa Runstedtler, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 41. “Eight Gangs in Big Black Belt,” Harlem Home News, May 19, 1911, 1. 42. Gangs in Harlem, 1, Social Adjustment of Negroes in New York City, Writers Program Collection, 1936–1941, Reel 5, SCRBC. 43. “Eight Gangs in Big Black Belt,” 1. 44. Ibid. 45. “High Grade Negro Frowns on Lower Class Rowdyism,” Harlem Home News, June 23, 1911, 1. 46. “Riot when Police Charge Negro Gang at 135th Street,” Harlem Home News, August 11, 1911, 10. 47. “Break the Silence,” New York Age, June 8, 1911, 4. 48. “Minister Calls Mass Meeting,” New York Age, June 8, 1911, 1. 49. “To-Night,” New York Age, June 15, 1911, 4. Black leaders coordinated these protests against police brutality with demands for the hiring of black police officers. Only weeks after this mass meeting, the Age announced the Mayor’s appointment of a black man, Samuel Battle, to the police department. “New York City Has a Colored Police Officer,” New York Age, June 29, 1911, 1. For the broader political dimensions of blacks’ campaign against police brutality and white violence, see chapter 2 of Marilynn S. Johnson’s Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York; on black manhood and World War I, see Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 7. 50. NYUL 1920, 5; “A Challenge to New York,” 6. 51. “Too Much ‘Gun Play’ in New York City,” New York Age, June 4, 1914, 4. 52. “District Attorney Swan Orders Inquiry into Brutal Murder of Richard Hill by the Police,” New York Age, May 31, 1917, 1. 53. Ibid. 54. “200 Negroes Fight Police Reserves,” New York Times, May 31, 1917, 18. 55. “District Attorney Swan Orders Inquiry,”1. 56. “Negro Guardsmen in San Juan Riot,” New York Times, July 4, 1917, 9. 57. Ibid.

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Notes

58. “Hayward Defends His Men,” New York Times, July 6, 1917, 9. 59. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 254. 60. Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 277. 61. Sarah Delany, A. Elizabeth Delany, and Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say; The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years (New York: Kodansha International, 1993), 103. 62. “Negro Loyalty in the Present Crisis,” New York Age, March 29, 1917, 4. 63. Watkins-Owen, Blood Relations, 101. 64. “Hayward Begins Inquiry into Riot,” New York Times, July 5, 1917, 9. 65. “The Unruly Tongues,” New York Age, July 12, 1917, 4. 66. “Hayward Begins Inquiry into Riot,” 9. 67. Quotation from Jeffrey B. Perry’s Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 310–311. 68. “Big Get Together Movement in Thirty-Eighth Precinct,” Chicago Defender, September 14, 1918, 5; for the World War I era’s red scare effect on the black community, see Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919–1925 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998). 69. “Police Brutality in Harlem, to Certain Policemen,” Crusader, October, 1918, 14. 70. “Urges Race Retaliation,” New York Times, June 20, 1921, 3. 71. Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Winston James, Holding the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1998); Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communism and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). 72. “Eyewitnesses Say Boddy Did Not Kill Cops,” Chicago Defender, January 21, 1922, 3. 73. “Warning to Policemen: Those That ‘Beat Up’ Prisoners Make Your Work Dangerous,” Negro World, January 21 1922, 11; and “Boddy Testifies to Police Beating,” New York Times, January 27, 1922. 74. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Opinion,” Crisis 22, no 5 (March 1922): 199. 75. New York Age, September 26, 1925, 1. 76. “The Third Degree,” New York Amsterdam News, August 18, 1926, 20. 77. A. L. Totten, “Police Brutality: An Open Letter to Commissioner McLaughlin,” New York Amsterdam News, August 18, 1926, 20. 78. W. R. Tatem, “Misuse of Police Power,” New York Amsterdam News, December 7, 1927, 20. 79. Quotation from Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like A Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 57. 80. Totten, “Police Brutality,” 20. 81. Edgar M. Grey “Civil Disabilities of the Harlem Negro,” New York Amsterdam News, December 8, 1926, 15. 82. New York Amsterdam News, August 8, 1928; People against Clarence Donald, Statements of Officers James Kubeil, Samuel McFadden, Young, Herman Destella, and

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Mrs. Chavis, November 20, 1928, New York City Indictment No. 174626, cal. no. 52964, 5–7, New York City Municipal Archives (NYCMA). 83. “2,500 Negroes Fight 150 Harlem Police,” New York Times, July 23, 1928, 1. 84. “Newspapermade Riots,” New York Age, August 4, 1928, 4. 85. “Lenox Avenue Crowd Makes Difficulty for Patrolman Attempting to Make Arrest,” New York Age, July 28, 1928, 1. 86. “Newspapermade Riots,” 4. 87. “Lenox Avenue Crowd,” 1. 88. Ibid. 89. “Why 3,000 Harlem Citizens Rebelled against the Authority of the Police Department,” New York Amsterdam News, July 25, 1928, 1. 90. Ibid. 91. “National Ass’n Taking Hand in Brutality Charges,”.New York Amsterdam News, August 1, 1928, 1. 92. “Defense Counsel Charge ‘Frame-Up’ to Clear Police,” New York Amsterdam News, August 8, 1928, 1. 93. “National Ass’n Taking Hand in Brutality Charges,” 1. 94. Ibid. 95. “Defense Counsel Charge ‘Frame-Up,’ to Clear Police,” 1. 96. Ibid., and “Near-Riot Witness Sentenced to Penitentiary,” New York Amsterdam News, November 21, 1928, 1. By November, Young’s statement to District Attorney John H. Levy differed from his earlier testimony. When Young relayed his statement to Levy, he claimed that Young grabbed him while he and Officer McFadden struggled with Donald. “Officer McFadden came along, and we brought him [Donald] down the block and backed him up against an automobile, where we were fighting with him for a while. In the meantime, another fellow attempted to assault me and take away my gun.” During Suner’s case in August, however, Young claimed that both Donald and Suner had gotten away. None of the officers’ statements ever mentioned Donald being out of their sight. See People against Clarence Donald, 1–3. 97. “Policemen Beat Up Near-Riot Witness in Station Houses,” New York Amsterdam News, August 22, 1928, 1. 98. “Another ‘Riot’ Witness Arrested,” New York Amsterdam News, August 15, 1928. 99. Letter to Honorable Panger from St. William Grant. November 11, 1928, New York City Indictment No. 174626, Calendar No. 52964, NYCMA. 100. “Magistrate Bushel Expresses Doubt of ‘Riot’ Witness’ Guilt,” New York Amsterdam News, August 29, 1928, 2. 101. People against St. William Grant, Statement of George Webber, 16th Squad. made to Assistant District Attorney Morris H. Panger. October 31, 1928, 3, New York City Indictment No. 174466, Calendar No. 52962, NYCMA. 102. People against St. William Grant, 3, and New York Amsterdam News, August 22, 1928. 103. According to the New York Amsterdam News, Donald, Grant, and Suner were all members of the Universal Improvement Association. See “U.N.I.A. Head Scores

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Police Brutality,” New York Amsterdam News, September 5, 1928, 1; “Hon. E. B. Knox, American Leader, Discusses Our Plans and Policies at Garvey Day Memorial Meeting,” Negro World, September 15, 1928, 2–3. For a biography of St. William Grant, see Robert A. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 7: 309–10. 104. “Magistrate Bushel Expresses Doubt,” 2. 105. Ibid. 106. People against Clarence Donald, 1–3. 107. People against Clarence Donald, Statements of Officer John L. Pendergrass, 18th Division, November 21, 1928, 2:30 p.m. Stenographer: C. H. Kuske. New York City Indictment No. 174626, cal. no. 52964, NYCMA. 108. People against Clarence Donald, 1. 109. “Brutality, Not Brains,” New York Amsterdam News, July 25, 1928. 110. “The Man in the Street,” New York Amsterdam News, August 1, 1928, 16. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid. 113. “Lawless Policemen,” New York Amsterdam News, October 17, 1928, 16. 114. “Police Lynch Law,” New York Amsterdam News, March 6, 1929, 16. 115. Quotation from Ethelred Brown in “The Man in the Street,” New York Amsterdam News, March 6, 1929, 16; “Police Terrorism,” New York Amsterdam News, March 13, 1929, 16.

Conclusion 1. Cheryl Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?” Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press 1991), 3. 2. “LaGuardia Is Accused of Insincerity in Probe,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 8, 1935, 5; and “Discrimination Caused Harlem Riot, Report,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 18, 1936, 3. 3. “Up to LaGuardia,” New York Amsterdam News, July 25, 1936, 12. 4. Kelly Miller, “The Causes of Segregation,” Current History 25, no. 6 (March 1927): 829. 5. T. R. Poston, “Rent Strike: Sugar Hill Rebellion Is One of Many against High Rates,” New York Amsterdam News, August 18, 1934, 9. 6. For the expansion of these struggles in the 1930s through the 1970s, see Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 7. Poston, “Rent Strike,” 9; Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?” 8. Beth T. Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); and Erik S. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

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Kelly, Brian. Race, Class, and Power in Alabama Coalfields, 1908–1921. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. ———. “Sentinels for the New South Industry: Booker T. Washington, Industrial Accommodation, and Black Workers in the Jim Crow South.” Labor History 44, no. 3 (2003). Kennedy, Louise Venable. Negro Peasant Turns Cityward: Effects of Recent Migrations to Northern Centers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930. Kerr-Ritchie, Jeffrey R. Freedpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia, 1860–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Kiser, Clyde Vernon. Sea Island to City: A Study of St. Helena Islanders in Harlem and Other Urban Centers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932. Kneeland, George J. Commercialized Prostitution in New York City. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith Publishing, 1969. Kornweibel, Theodore, Jr. “Investigate Everything”: Federal Efforts to Compel Black Loyalty during World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. ———. No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917–1928. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975. ———. “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns against Black Militancy, 1919–1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Kosak, Hadassa. Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrants Workers, New York City, 1881–1905. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Lasch-Quinn, Elisabeth. Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Lawson, Ronald, and Mark Naison. The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1986. Lee, Maureen Elgersman. Black Bangor: African Americans in a Maine Community, 1880–1950. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. Lemke-Santiago, Gretchen. Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Lerner, Michael A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Letwin, Daniel. The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878– 1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993. ———. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Lewis, Earl. In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

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Lorini, Alessandra. Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Lovejoy, Owen R. The Negro Children of New York. New York: The Children’s Aid Society, 1932. Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Malone, Jacqui. Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Mansbridge, Jane, and Aldon Morris, eds. Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Marks, Carole. Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Migration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Martin, Tony. Marcus Garvey, Hero: A First Biography. Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1983. ———. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976. McBride, David. “The Black-White Mortality Differential in New York State, 1900– 1950: A Socio-Historical Reconsideration.” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 14, no. 2 (1990). McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. McKiven, Henry M. Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. McLaughlin, Malcolm. “Reconsidering the East St. Louis Race Riot of 1917.” International Review of Social History 47, no. 2 (August 2002): 187–212. Mitchell, Michele. Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Mjagkiji, Nina. Light of the Darkness: African Americans and the YMCA, 1862–1946. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Mohun, Arwen, P. Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880–1940. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. Montgomery, David. Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Moore, Jesse Thomas, Jr. A Search for Equality: The National Urban League, 1910–1961. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. Moore, Shirley Ann Wilson. To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910–196. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Mumford, Kevin J. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. ———. “Homosex Changes: Race, Cultural Geography, and the Emergence of the Gay.” American Quarterly 48, no. 3 (September 1996): 395–414. Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem during the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

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Nelson, Bruce. Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Nelson, Jill, ed. Police Brutality: An Anthology. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001. Northrup, Herbert R. Organized Labor and the Negro. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944. Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Ottley, Roi, and William Weatherby. The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History. New York: New York Public Library, 1967. Ovington, Mary White. Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911. Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. ———. “Black Workers from Reconstruction to the Great Depression.” In Working for Democracy: American Workers from the Revolution to the Present, edited by Paul Buhle and Alan Dawley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. ———.“The New Labor History and the Historial Moment.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 2, no. 3 (Spring 1989). Parris, Guichard, and Lester Brooks. Blacks in the City: A History of the National Urban League. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1971. Patterson, Tiffany Ruby. Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. ———, and Robin D. G. Kelley. “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World.” African Studies Review 43, no. 1 (April 2000): 11–45. Payne, Charles. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California, 2007. Payne, Charles M., and Adam Green, eds. Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850–1950. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Peiss, Kathy Lee. Cheap Amusements; Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Phillips, Kimberley. AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working- Class, 1915–45. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Pierce, Richard B. The Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis, 1920–1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pleck, Elizabeth H. Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865–1900. New York: Academic Press, 1979. Pratt, Henry J. Churches and Urban Government in Detroit and New York, 1895–1994. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004.

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Reed, Ruth. Negro Illegitimacy in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1926. Reed, Toure F. Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Robbins, Richard. Sidelines Activist: Charles S. Johnson and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Robertson, Stephen. “Harlem Undercover: Vice Investigators, Race, and Prostitution, 1910–1930.” Journal of Urban History 35, no. 4 (May 2009): 486–504. ———, Shane White, Stephen Garton, and Graham White. “Disorderly House: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of Sexuality in 1920s Harlem.” Journal of History of Sexuality 21, no. 3 (September 2012): 443–66. Roediger, David. “‘Labor in White Skin’: Race and Working-Class History.” In Reshaping the U.S. Left; Popular Struggles in the 1980s, edited by Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker. London: Verso, 1988. Rutkoff, Peter M. and Williams B. Scott. Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Sacks, Marcy S. Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Schatzberg, Rufus. Black Organized Crime in Harlem: 1920–1930. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. Scheiner, Seth. Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920. New York: New York University Press, 1965. Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Sernett, Milton C. Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Shapiro, Herbert. White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Shockley, Megan Taylor. We, Too, Are Americans: African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940–1954. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Shulman, Harry Manuel. Slums of New York. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1938. Simmons, Christina. “African Americans and Sexual Victorianism in the Social Hygiene Movement, 1910–1940.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 1 (1993): 51–75. Smith, J. Douglas. Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Smith, Richard. Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Spear, Allan H. Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

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Spero, Sterling D., and Abram L. Harris. The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement. New York: Atheneum, 1974. Stack, Carol B. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1975. Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. ———. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008. Summers, Martin. The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900– 30. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Theoharis, Jeanne F., Komozi Woodard, and Matthew Countryman. Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Thomas, Richard W. Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Thorin, Tritter. “The Growth and Decline of Harlem’s Housing.” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 22, no.1 (1998). Tobier, Emanuel. “Manhattan’s Business District in the Industrial Age.” In Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City, edited by John Hull Mollenkopf. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988. Trotter, Joe William. Black Milwaukee: The Making of the Industrial Proletariat, 1915– 1945. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. ———. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. ———, ed. The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. ———, Earl Lewis, and Tera W. Hunter, eds. The African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. Walker, Juliet E. K. The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship. New York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1998. Watkins-Owens, Irma. Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Watts, Jerry, ed. Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Reconsidered. New York: Routledge, 2004. Weil, François. A History of New York, translated by Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Weisenfeld, Judith. African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Weiss, Nancy J. The National Urban League, 1910–1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

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Wesley, Charles H., Negro Labor in the United States 1850–1925: A Study in American Economic History. New York: Vanguard Press, 1927. White, Deborah G. Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894– 1994. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999. White, Luise. “A Colonial State and an African Petty Bourgeoisie: Prostitution, Property, and Class Struggle in Nairobi, 1936–1940.” In Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa, edited by Frederick Cooper. London: Sage Publications, 1983. White, Shane. Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770– 1810. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. ———, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White. Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Wilder, Craig Steven, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. ———. In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Williams, Chad L. Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Williams, Kidada E. They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Williams, Rhonda Y. The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Wolcott, Victoria. Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Woodson, Carter G. A Century of Negro Migration. New York: Russell and Russell, 1918. Woofter, Thomas Jackson. Negro Problems in Cities: A Study. College Park, MD: McGrath Publishing, 1969.

Dissertations Clement, Elizabeth Alice. “Trick or Treat: Prostitution and Working-Class Women’s Sexuality in New York City, 1900–1932.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998. Fairclough, Alice Brown. “A Study of Occupational Opportunities for Negro Women in New York.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1929. Faussette, Risa L. “Race, Migration, and Port City Radicalism: New York’s Black Longshoremen and the Politics of Maritime Protest.” Ph.D. diss., Binghamton University, 2002. Harris, Leslie Maria. “Creating the African American Working Class: Black and White Workers, Abolitionists and Reformers in New York City, 1785–1863.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1995.

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Lewis, Edward Shakespear. “The Urban League, A Dynamic Instrument in Social Change: A Study of the Changing Role of the New York Urban League, 1910–1960.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1961. Sacks, Marcy Sarah. “‘We Cry among the Skyscrapers’: Black People in New York City, 1880–1915.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999. Thomas, Deborah Gisele. “Workers and Organizers: African American Women in the Work Force and Club Movement, 1890–1930.” Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1998.

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Index

Abyssinian Baptist Church, 23, 40–41, 115; fight against prostitution, 126–127 African Blood Brotherhood, 112, 171, 194n15 Afro-American Reality Company, 20 Allison, Charles C., 47 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 9, 54, 74, 91; and the Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers, 77, 80–82 American Fund for Public Service (AFPS), 78–80, 82 American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), 81, 115. See also Communist Party American West Indian Ladies Society (AWILS), 24 Anderson, James, 24 April Rent Laws, 103 Auerbach, Sol, 113 Bailey, Dermot, 180, 182 Baldwin, James, 1, 2, 6 Baldwin, Ruth Standish, 45 Batchelor, Carey, What the Tenement Family Has and What It Pays for It, 96 Bates, Beth, 5 Battle, Samuel, J., 24, 227n49 Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 23, 42, 163 black freedom movement, 4, 189, 193n12; community rights as a form of, 5 black metropolis, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14, 15, 23, 28, 39, 51, 108, 141 black nationalism, 3, 15 black-owned businesses, 26, 30

black public sphere, 9–11, 54, 91; against police brutality, 169–173, 174–176, 183–185 The Black Worker (Spero and Harris), 64 block association, 47, 49 Boy Scouts of America, 50 Brecher, Leo, 86–89 Brooklyn, 42, 43, 57, 59, 70, 72, 209n115 Brooks, W. H., 162 Bronx Tax Payers Association (BTPA), 118 Brotherhood of Dining Car Employees (BDCE), 50, 72, 80 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (BSCP), 71, 76, 79 Brown, Ethelred, 184 buffet flats, 121, 123, 125, 126–128, 131, 139; controlled by whites, 146–147; site of privacy and black entrepreneurialism, 134–137 Campbell, Grace, 114 Chavis, Zerlena, 177, 179, 180, 181 Chicago Defender, 27, 174 Chicago race riot, 67 Chinn, May E., 77 churches, 6, 7, 8, 14, 16, 18, 49, 75, 91, 93; in Harlem, 23–24; role in migration to Harlem, 21, 23; role in tenant campaign for lower rent and improved housing conditions, 98, 102–103, 115; social reform and, 40–42 Citizens’ Protective League (CPL), 1 Civil Practice Act, 118 247

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civil rights, 3, 5, 8, 14, 24, 198n12; in Harlem, 33–38; the labor movement and, 81; police failure to protect, 145, 158, 165–166, 168, 170–171, 189 Civil Service Act, 118 Clark, Jessie, A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker, 64, 76 Clark, J. T., 100 Claymes, Raymond, 137, 145 Colored Business Men’s Association, 25, 27 Colvin, Claudette, 38 Commission on Housing and Regional Planning, 96 Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions For Negroes in New York City (CIICN), 45 Committee of Fourteen (COF), 124, 151; collaboration with the New York Urban League, 129–130, 143–144; threatened privacy, 136–139. See also prostitution Committee on Urban Conditions (CUC), 45 Communist Party, 81, 91; American Negro Labor Congress and, 81, 115; Emergency Rent Laws and, 112–117. See also Harlem Tenants League community building, 3–4, 9, 14, 23, 43, 46, 121 community politics, 5–7, 12, 45, 51, 53, 112, 131, 150, 169, 188, 194n15 community rights, 2, 4, 5–7, 9, 11; black economic autonomy and, 24–28; black women led tenant campaign and, 97–103; Emergency Rent Laws and, 104–106; Hubert Harrison and, 73–74, 88–90; migration to Harlem and, 17– 23; respectability and, 39–44, 122–124, 126–131, 143–150; self-defense and, 159, 167, 170, 173, 175, 183, 185; Urban League and, 45–48 congregation, 8, 29, 41, 102, 121, 123; challenges to, 131–134; and rent parties, 139–143

Connor, John W., 29, 30, 31 consumerism, 7–8, 9, 10, 15–16; civil rights and, 34–38; consumer rights and black proprietors, 25–27, 30; suppression of, 40–43, 52 Costuma, David E., 110, 111 Cotton Club, 133 crime, 3, 40, 41, 45, 52, 145, 148, 149, 150; self-defense equated with, 163, 163, 166, 178, 199n95, 200n123, 226n37 Crisis, 33, 36, 174 Crolley, Jane, 115 Crosswaith, Frank, 9, 54, 76–82 Crusader, 171, Cruse, Harold, 211n153 Daily Worker, 113–114, 116 Darktown Follies, 31 Dean, Mary (“Pig Foot Mary”), 25 DeSilva, C., 100–102 Domingo, W. A., 173 Donald, Clarence, 177, 181, 182 “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work,” 9, 189 Dorrance Brooks Square, 115 Dougherty, Romeo, 86 Du Bois, W. E. B, 3, 24, 33, 126, 128, 166; defense of Luther Boddy, 174 East St. Louis Riot, 67, 168, 169, 171 Edmond’s Cellar, 30 Elevator and Switchboard Operators Union, 74 Ellington, Duke, 139, 141, 142, 143 Emergency Rent Laws, 50, 94, 103–106, 108, 119; campaign to extend, 112–117 Enoch, May, 1 Equity Congress, 24 Fauset, Jessie, 36 Fifteenth Infantry Regiment, 168 Fillmore, Charles W., 117 Fisher, Rudolph, 133–134 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 80–82

Index

Fosdick, Raymond, 125 Frayne, Hugh, 75, 77, 80 “freedom rights,” 193n12. See also Jeffries, Hasan K. Garvey, Marcus, 3, 14, 74, 85, 174, 192n10, 230n103 Gimbel Brothers’ department store, 36 Gordon, Taylor, 28 Grant, St. William, 180, 181–182 grassroots activism, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 Great Migration, 4, 14, 16, 45, 53, 54, 67, 75, 134, 169, 188 Great War, 3, 4, 7, 10, 22, 28, 53; economic impact on black men, 62–63; economic impact on black women, 64–67 Green, William, 80–81, 91 Grenthal, Abraham, 109–112, 113, 116; black mobilization against, 117–118 Grey, Edgar M., 132, 146–147 Grohman Brothers, 100–101 Half a Man (Ovington), 126 Hall, George E., 111 Harlem: battle for housing in, 17–23; churches in, 23–24; creation of black metropolis, 23–33; geographical boundaries, 23; place of congregation, 28–33; population of, 23 Harlem Home News, 22, 164, 165 Harlem stride piano, 139, 141, 223n81 Harlem Tenants League, 10, 93, 94, 112; campaign to extend Emergency Rent Laws, 112–117 Harris, Abram, The Black Worker, 64 Harris, Arthur, 1 Harris, George W., 117, 118 Harrison, Hubert, 73, 83, 85, 188; against police brutality, 169, 171, 184; defense of black projectionist, 88–90; and selfdefense, 169–170 Haynes, George Edmunds, 13, 75; The Negro at Work in New York City, 126

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249

Hayward, Williams, 168 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 47, 224n108 Hill, Thomas Arnold, 76, 80 Hine, Darlene Clark, 218n7 Holden, Arthur C., 46 Home to Harlem (McKay), 65 housing, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 24, 44, 45, 50, 51; black women led tenant campaign, 97–103; Emergency Rent Laws and, 50, 94, 103–106, 108, 112–117, 119; search in Harlem for, 17–22. See also Harlem Tenants League Housing Conditions among Negroes in Harlem, New York City (NLUCAN), 130 Howard University, 13 Hubert, James H., 46, 50, 144, 171 Hubert, Levi, 10 Hylan, John, 59, 69, 70 “If We Must Die” (McKay), 173 immigration, 53, 59; Afro-Caribbean, 23, 24, 35, 60, 61, 204n38; Italians, 57, 59, 69–70, 95, 125, 132, 158; Jews, 26, 57, 58, 132 Improvement Benevolent Protective Order of Elks (IBPOE), 24 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 69, 74 International Hod Carriers, Building and Common Laborers Union (IHCBCLU), 71–72 International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), 71, 74, 77, 208n115 International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), 68–70, 71, 72, 73 Jeffries, Hasan K., “freedom rights,” 193n12 Jewish National Workers’ Alliance, 58 Johnson, Charles, 54 Johnson, Howard “Stretch,” 133 Johnson, Jack, 227n40 Johnson, James P., 141, 142

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Index

Johnson, James Weldon, 13, 17, 31, 32, 39, 53, 81, 122, 153, 171; and civil rights, 35– 37; and economic autonomy, 25–26, 28 Johnson, Marilynn S., 199n95, 227n49 Jones, Eugene Kinckle, 64, 75 Jones, J. Raymond, 34, 59 Jones, Winnie, 98 Juvenile Park Protective League (JPPL), 47–48, 201n129 Kelley, Robin D. G., 6, 16, 194n18, 197n57 Kelley, William, 91, 110, 175 Kellor, Frances, 43 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 5, Ladies Civic Club, 115 Lafayette Theater, 9, 31, 32, 55; and black projectionists’ strike, 82–90 LaGuardia, Fiorello H., 187 landsmanshaften, 58 Lane, Winthrop D., 19 legalism, 154, 159, 162, 166, 186 “Legal Talks,” 104–106 leisure geography, 125, 132, 134, 143, 144 Leroy’s Café, 29, 31 Lewis, Earl, 8, 192n8 “lodger evil,” 126, 131, 143, 144 Loew, Marcus, 36 Loews Theaters, 36–37, 90 Manhattan Council Girl Scouts, 50 marketplace, 8, 15; black intraracial conflict and, 26–27; civil rights struggle and, 35–38; congregation and, 28–32 Marshall Hotel, 28, 125 Maternity Center Association (MCA), 49 Matthews, Victoria Earle, 8, 43–44 Mayor’s Committee of Women (MCW), 49 Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering (MCRP), 104 Mayor’s Unemployment Committee (MUC), 49

McAdoo, William, 156, 158–160 McDougald, Gertrude E., 77, 81; A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker, 64, 66 McKay, Claude, 29, 132; Home to Harlem, 65; “If We Must Die,” 173, 184 Messenger, 65, 74, 78, 79 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 49 Miller, Kelly, 13, 187 Mitchell, Michelle, 38, 123 Montgomery, David, 58–59, 203n18 Moore, Audley, 61 Moore, Fred R., 25, 37, 75, 91, 102, 107, 149; “vote black” campaign, 117–119 Moore, Richard B., 93, 94; Harlem Tenant’s League and, 112–117 Moses, Bob, 5 Motion Picture Operators Union (MPOU), Local 306, 55, 82–90 Multiple Dwelling Law, 118 Nail, John E., 21–22, 99 National Adjustment Commission, 69 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 16, 34–38, 51, 81, 90, 188, 189 National Association for the Protection of Colored Women (NAPCW), 45 National Association of Colored Women (NACW), 43 National Federation of African-American Women (NFAAW), 43 National League for the Protection of Colored Women (NLPCW), 164 National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes (NLUCAN), 17, 75, 100; and the campaign against vice activity, 129–131; Housing Conditions among Negroes in Harlem, New York City. See also National Urban League; New York Urban League

Index

National Negro Business League (NNBL), 25, 53 National Prohibition Act, 131 National Urban League (NUL), 8, 13, 17, 76, 80, 145, 148. See also National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes; New York Urban League Negro at Work in New York City (Haynes), 126 Negro Civic Improvement League (NCIL), 98–99, 103 “negro invasion,” 19, 21, 47, 160 Negro Mecca, 13, 14, 28, 32, 121, 122, 187; threatened by Prohibition 131–134 Negro Renaissance, 3, 4, 150 Negro World, 17, 74, 174 Neighborhood Association (NA), 98–99 A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker (Clark and McDougald), 64, 76 New Deal, 4 New Negro activist, 6, 9, 11, 154, 183 New Negro movement, 3, 4 New York Age, 8, 9, 11, 18; black business and, 25–27, 121, 123; legalism and, 154–160, 161, 163–164, 165–166, 170, 177–179, 183, 184, 227n49; migration to Harlem and, 21; respectability and, 39, 121–124, 127–129, 145–147, 149–150 New York Amsterdam News, 10, 11, 28; anti-vice campaign and, 132, 146– 147, 148; black projectionists’ strike and, 82–90; Harlem race riot of 1928, 179–180; police brutality and, 174–176, 183–185; tenant campaign for lower rent and better housing conditions and, 104–106; “vote black” campaign, 108–112, 117–118 New York Call, 74 New York City: labor demographics, 205n43, 205n46, 206n62–63; political economy, 7, 53, 55–57; segregation, 33–38 New York exceptionalism, 3, 4

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New York Health Department, 49 New York News, 117 New York Police Department, 11, 24, 153– 154, 162, 165, 171, 174, 183–184, 225n6. See also riots New York State’s Civil Rights Law, 36 New York Times: and housing, 19, 20; and incriminating blacks, 155, 159, 162, 177 New York Tuberculosis and Health Association (NYTHA), 49, 50 New York Urban League, 9, 45, 46, 60, 68, 76, 96, 104, 118, 143, 151, 188, 221n56. See also National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes; National Urban League North Harlem Community Council (NHCC), 24, 115, 118 oppositional consciousness, 6, 194n16, 211n153 Ovington, Mary W., 43; Half a Man, 126 Owen, Chandler, 9, 74–75 padroni, 58 Parker, Henry C., 21, 99 Parks and Playground Association (PPA), 48, 49 Parks, Rosa, 38 Payne, Charles, 5 Payton, Philip Jr., 17–21, 25 Perkins, Lamar, 117, 118 “Police Brutality in Harlem” (Razafkeriefo), 172 politics of dignity, 15, 16, 33, 51, 195n6 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr., 43, 91, 166, 171; anti-vice campaign and, 126–127; migration to Harlem and, 23; respectability and, 40–41, 42 privacy, 10, 123, 124; challenges to, 134–139, 221n56 Prohibition, 10, 15, 121–123, 138, 143, 144, 147, 150; and congregation, 131–134

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Index

Property Owners Protective Association of Harlem (POPAH), 21 prostitution, 46, 123, 124, 125, 126–131; policing of, 143–149, 151; residentialbased, 134–139. See also Committee of Fourteen; sex work public space, 10, 14; and civil rights, 16, 32, 33–38; and respectability, 38–40 Randolph, Asa Philip, 3, 4, 9, 14, 65, 74, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 188, 211n152 Randolph, Lucille, 65 Ransom, Reverdy C., 24, 41, 42, 44, 163– 164, 165, 226n37 Razafkeriefo, Andrea, “Police Brutality in Harlem,”172–173 Real Estate Board of New York City, 118 Real Estate Men’s Association of Trade and Commerce, 117 realtors, 7, 11, 14, 19, 20, 93, 95, 100, 104, 106, 117,164; black realtors claim Harlem, 18–23; black realtors exploit black tenants, 98–100, 103, 116; tensions among white realtors, landlords, and tenants, 17–18, 19; white realtors organize against “negro invasion,” 20, 21–22 Reid, Ira De, 72, 96, 139, 191n7 rent parties, 123; as a form of congregation, 139–143; equated with criminal activity, 147–148; tenant complaints and, 148–150 respectability, 5, 7, 8, 10, 14, 16, 47, 51, 123; black business and, 121, 127–129; community rights and, 38–44; and the NAACP and, 37; and the NLUCAN, 129–131 riots, 13, 38, 80, 148, 153, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162, 167, 168; Chicago race riot of 1919, 67; East St. Louis, 1917, 67, 168, 169, 170– 171; Harlem race riot of 1928, 11, 177–183, 185; Harlem race riot of 1935, 187; New York City race riot of 1900, 1, 2, 4, 154, 187; Tulsa race riot of 1921, 173

Riverfront and Marine Workers Union, 69 Rivers, Frances E., 117, 118 Robertson, Stephen, 136, 151, 220n44, 221n56 Robeson, Eslanda, 32 Robeson, Paul, 32, 133 Robinson, Anna J., 104–106 Royale Café, 29, 30 Royall, John M., 99, 102–103 Russell Sage Foundation, 70, 75 San Juan Hill, 2, 8, 11, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24, 28, 94, 95, 125, 141; police brutality in, 154– 160, 162, 165, 166, 167–168, 169 Schiffman, Frank, 87–89 Schuyler, George, 63–64 Seabrook, John Howard, 211n152 sedentary communities, 55, 58, 59, 203n18 self-defense, 4, 11, 74, 112, 151, 154, 159, 167, 175, 183, 185; and the New Negro, 169–174 self-protection, 8, 10, 153, 154, 160, 162, 164–166, 185, 189, and the New Negro, 169–174 sexual geography, 125, 143 sex work, 6, 124, 125, 128, 134–139, 221n56, 222n59. See also prostitution Sims, G. H., 88, 158, 165, 168 Smith, Willie “The Lion,” 139, 142 social reform, 3, 8, 14, 16–17; anti-vice campaign and, 125–131, 143–150; community rights and, 38–44; New York Urban League and, 45–50 Sojourner Truth House, 48 speakeasies, 6, 123, 131–132, 134, 136, 141, 142, 150 Speedwell Society for Convalescent Babies (SSCB), 50 Spero, Sterling, The Black Worker, 64 Spingarn, Arthur, 34 Spingarn, Joel E., 34 Stewart, Gilchrist, 34 St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church, 41–42, 162, 165, 173

Index

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St. Phillips Protestant Episcopal Church, 21 strikebreaking, 67, 76, 209n115 Suner, Pedro, 180–181, 183, 229n96 Sweet, Ossian, 13

Vaccarelli, Paul, 69 Van Wyck, Robert A., 1 Victoria Theater, 36–37, 43, 90 Voice, 74; and police brutality, 170, 171, 172. See also Harrison, Hubert

Tattler, 37, 115 Taylor, John G., 21–22 Tenderloin, 1–2, 4, 8, 11, 18, 28, 41, 125, 128, 155, 160, 173, 188 theaters, 6, 8, 16, 29, 30, 31, 51; black projectionists’ strike and, 82–90; civil rights and, 33, 34, 36–37; social reform and, 39, 41 third degree, 11, 154; and the black public sphere, 174–176 Thorpe, Robert J., 1 369th Regiment of the United States Army, 24, 168 Thurman, Wallace, 31, 133, 140, 142 Trade Union Committee for the Organization for Negro Workers (TUCONW), 9, 54–55, 76–83, 188. See also Crosswaith, Frank

Walker, James J., 37 Walker, Madame C. J., 65 Waller, Thomas “Fats” Wright, 141–142, 143, 223n81 Warner, E. Hortense, 115 Washington, Booker T., 3, 15, 25, 43 Washington, Naomi, 141 Waters, Ethel, 30, 32, 134, 135 Welfare Council of New York City (WCNYC), 50 West Harlem Community Council, 24 What the Tenement Family Has and What It Pays for It (Batchelor), 96 White Rose Mission, 8, 43 White Rose Travelers’ Aid Society, 43 Wilkins, Barron, 29, 125 Wilkins, Leroy, 29, 31 Williams, Bert, 24, 133 Williams, Harold, 115 Women’s Loyal Union of Manhattan and Brooklyn, 43 Women’s Political Study Class, 115 Women’s Prison Association (WPA), 151 Woofter, T. J., 96, 97 Woolworth Company, F. W., 35, 57 Workmen’s Circle, 58

United Association of Colored Motion Picture Operators (UACMPO), 83 United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners (UBCJ), 73 United Council of Working Class Housewives (UCWCH), 115 United Neighborhood Houses, 96 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 194n15 U.S. Shipping Board, 70 Utopia Neighborhood League (UNL), 83

Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 59 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 59

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About the Author

Shannon King is Associate Professor of History at the College of Wooster.

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