“My God, they must have riots on those things all the time”: African American Geographies and Bodies on Northern Urban Public Transportation, 1915–1940

“On a bright September morning in 1921, I came up out of the subway at 135^th and Lenox into the beginnings of the Negro Renaissance,” Langston Hughes wrote about his introduction to Harlem.¹ Three years after his first steps into sunny Harlem, a subway platform became the setting for Hughes’ “Subway Face,” a poem of anonymous, fleeting attraction originally published in the December 1924 issue of the NAACP’s Crisis:

That I have been looking For you all my life Does not matter to you. You do not know.

You never knew. Nor did I. Now you take the Harlem train uptown; I take a local down.²

The subway itself is secondary to Hughes’ encounter with the person across the subway platform, just as it is mere background to his recollection of the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance. But the subway was what connected Harlem to the rest of Manhattan, and without it, the “Subway Face” encounter would not have been possible. The poem hinges on the fleeting and anonymous nature of the encounter, enabled by the two trains traveling in opposite directions on a fixed schedule, precluding any deeper connection. In eight sparse lines, Hughes captures the anonymity and mobility of city life.

In the quarter-century between the World Wars—roughly from 1915 to 1940—in cities like New York and Chicago, public transportation was integral to urban culture, shaping the experience of an accelerated pace of life. Before suburbanization and the automobile dominated the American landscape, subways and streetcars were king. In literature, they brought Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man into Harlem and were the backdrop to Bigger Thomas’ Chicago in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Public transportation constituted not merely a technological innovation, but a social, economic, and aesthetic one as well, bringing together and leveling diverse riderships with a flat, affordable five-cent fare that took passengers to their destinations with modern speed and style. As Hughes subtly reminds the reader in “Subway Face,” the same subway platform could take a rider uptown to black Harlem or downtown to white Manhattan; it expanded the sphere of citizens’ mobility for work and recreation beyond their immediate surroundings to the entirety of Manhattan and, eventually, to the surrounding boroughs as well. Similarly, elevated trains and streetcars transported African Americans to and from Chicago’s South Side black belt for work and play, making the boundaries of a segregated community more fluid than perhaps many whites would have liked them to be.

Whereas African Americans could be residentially segregated with housing costs, exclusionary covenants, city planning, and discriminatory hiring practices, anyone with the five-cent fare was able to ride the El or the subway. The result was an uneasy and contested public social space that, while it condensed space and time by making it easier and faster to travel long distances in shorter times, on a more individual level also presented a condensed space within the confines of the mode of transportation. It was a space that, as passengers sat or stood hanging onto a leather strap within a streetcar or a subway car, was often crowded and forced different races, classes, ethnicities, and genders into closer proximity than was experienced in even city streets or public parks. Although not published until 1951 in Montage of a Dream Deferred, Hughes’ “Subway Rush Hour” would have rung just as true in the interwar years:

Mingled breath and smell so close mingled black and white so near no room for fear.³

While “Subway Face” implies condensed geographical space on a communal level, “Subway Rush Hour” reveals condensed bodily space on a personal level as riders are physically pressed close to one another in a subway car. Whether the poem’s last line—“no room for fear”—is more a statement of what is or what ought to be remains unclear, but the nearly claustrophobic bodily contact is inescapable, just as it was for subway and streetcar riders between the World Wars. By the postwar era, perhaps...