2. Prior to 1920
0 Post-Civil War: waves of South-to-North immigration
0 especially after Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
0 African Americans were already living in NYC:
0 Mid-1800s: SoHo area
0 Late 1800s: Greenwich Village
0 1890s: West 20s and 30s
0 1900s: West 50s, begin move into Harlem
0 Harlem in 1900:
0 Overzealous housing development (for white workers)
0 Subway hasn’t fully arrived, especially on the east side
0 African-American migration begins on the east side, moves west
0 From 1900-1920, the number of blacks living in Harlem doubles
3. Harlem in 1920
Online Resources
0 The Harlem
Renaissance: An
Overview
0 Digital Harlem
4. Harlem in 1920
0 Demographics
0 1920: 152,467 people of African
descent living in NYC. 39,233 born
in NY State, 30,436 from outside US
(primarily Caribbean), and 78,242
from other states (mostly
Southern).
0 1920-1925: approx. 50,000 more
arrive from the South
0 Quickly overcrowded: up to 3x as
many people in the same space
when compared to just a few
decades prior
0 “a race capital”: “Black Mecca”
0 A space for…
0 new opportunity and improvement
0 intellectual and aesthetic expansion
0 cultural solidification
5. Segregation in 1920s Harlem
0 “Irrational distinctions” in terms of A Negro worker may not be a street or
employment: subway conductor because of the possibility
0 one-drop rule of public objection to contact but he may be
0 “Passing” is a general cultural phenomenon— a ticket chopper. He may not be a money
so is the rejection thereof changer in a subway station because
0 “color lines within the color line” honesty is required yet he may be entrusted,
0 As whites discriminate against blacks by as a messenger, with thousands of dollars
being unable to see them as real (can only daily. He may not sell goods over a counter
see stereotypes), the same thing happens
between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned but he may deliver the goods after they
African Americans have been sold. He may be a porter in
0 Women are doubly discriminated against: charge of a sleeping car without a
0 no positive healthy images in popular conductor, but never a conductor; he may
culture—not considered society’s ideal of be a policeman but not a fireman; a
beauty linotyper, but not a motion picture
0 still seen as sexually indiscriminate (the operator; a glass annealer, but not a glass
legacy of slavery)
blower; a deck hand, but not a sailor.
0 women of mixed heritage still seen as
particularly sexually exotic (legacy of the
“tragic mulatto” character of the 1800s)
6. The “city within a city”
0 safe haven
0 “voluntary segregation”
0 Harlem is a modern ghetto. True, that is a contradiction
in terms, but prejudice has ringed this group around
with invisible lines and bars. Within the bars you will
find a small city, self-sufficient, complete in itself a riot
of color and personality, a medley of song and tears, a
canvas of browns and golds and flaming reds. And yet
bound. (Eunice Hunton)
10. African Americans on Race in the
1920s
0 Race as a global idea
0 West Indians had historically played a big role in cultural development
0 Cultural divide between Southern migrants and Caribbean immigrants
0 The question of Africa: how to relate to that land and its peoples
0 Reestablishing an African-American past
0 Schomburg: “reclaimed background”
0 How to fix the social and economic damage of slavery?
0 “Each one teach one” idea (starts during slavery, re: reading)
0 Being a breakthrough person, a “first,” doesn’t guarantee a sustained future for others
(will there be a “second”?)
0 Booker T. Washington—industrial education/skills development
0 W.E.B. DuBois—“Talented Tenth”: (essay, 1903) 1 in 10 black men may become leaders.
Should have a classical (not industrial) education in order to ensure that they do.
0 Marcus Garvey, “Back to Africa” movement. Reunite all people of African ancestry into
one community with one absolute government
0 Art, Music, Performance: a means of agitating for equality, progress (ex: Paul Robeson)
0 Bye & Bye (with Lawrence Brown; 1925)
0 Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (1933)
0 On playing Othello (1943)
11. Jazz
0 Divisive new sound
0 as culturally disruptive as Modernism was
0 musically fragmented, draws upon primitivism
0 Prohibition + segregation results in some very strange
combinations:
0 Cotton Club: African-American performers, white patrons
0 Going to jazz clubs in Harlem was the “hip” thing to do—“edgy”
0 1st unique American musical sound for export
0 Roots in African-American folk culture, Creole culture of New
Orleans, city sounds
0 Risqué, explicitly sexual
0 Rogers: Musically jazz has a great future. It is rapidly being
sublimated.
12. Theorizing Jazz
The jazz spirit, being Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.
primitive, demands more In its beginnings, the United States
frankness and sincerity. Just spawned certain ideals of freedom
as it already has done in art and independence through which,
eventually, jazz was evolved, and the
and music, so eventually in
music is so free that many people
human relations and social say it is the only unhampered,
manners, it will no doubt unhindered expression of complete
have the effect of putting freedom yet produced in this
more reality in life by taking country.—Ellington
some of the needless
artificiality out. —Rogers Duke Ellington and His Cotton Club
Orchestra, 1928: “The Mooche”
