Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City Before World War I

Introduction

Introduction In 1902,James Weldon Johnson left his Jacksonville, Florida, home and his steadyjob as a school principal to settle in New York City. Neither his decision to leave the South nor his choice of destinations came unexpectedly . He had already made a number of trips to New York, the first in 1884 when he was still a boy. From his earliest encounter with Manhattan , Johnson loved the city and its "cosmopolitanism." "It would not have taken a psychologist to understand that I was born to be a New Yorker," he admitted in his autobiography. He felt a strong emotional connection to New York and often heard his parents "talk ... about the city much in the manner that exiles or emigrants talk about the homeland ."1 On his first visit, Johnson saw New York through the eyes of a child. He loved the ferryboats, was awed by the crowds and noise, and admired the "biggity" boys. He thrilled at the chance to cross the East River from his aunt and uncle's Brooklyn home and spend the day wandering through Lord and Taylor's. One of his sojourns to Manhattan struck him with particular meaning as he recalled his experience nearly a half century later. He reminisced about a time when his uncle took him on an excursion "far up toward Harlem, a region then inhabited largely by squatters and goats." Johnson perhaps exaggerated Harlem's emptiness; in the 1880s it housed a genteel community of upper-class white elitesManhattan 's first residential suburb. Still, the contrast with the Harlem of the 1930s, when Johnson published his autobiography, could hardly have been more dramatic. In the intervening period between Johnson's first visit and the time he wrote his memoirs, Harlem had become a neighborhood transformed, housing 50,000 black residents in 1914 and nearly 165,000 by 1930.2 Johnson noted that he had few black playmates during his childhood stay, not especially surprising in 1884, when the black population of Manhattan was just over twenty thousand and scattered throughout the city. Only about ten thousand black people lived in Brooklyn, where Johnson spent most of his time.3 Despite the shortage of friends, Johnson remembered that T. Thomas Fortune, another Florida native who had recently settled in New York, often spent time at Johnson's aunt's 2 Introduction house.4 As more and more black people migrated to New York City from the South and the Caribbean, many surrounded themselves with acquaintances from home states and islands in order to create a sense of identity in the anonymous and crowded world of the big city. Along with his brother, Rosamond, Johnson first returned to New York as an adult in 1899 on a summer hiatus from his teaching job in Jacksonville. The city had literally grown up since his childhood days. Scrambling to find space for its burgeoning business district, architects who felt constrained by Manhattan's geographic limitations began looking upward. During the 1880s the city constructed its first elevator buildings , soon to become the workplaces of nearly one-third of the city's black men. New architectural initiatives and revised building codes allowed for still taller buildings and created a new cultural milieu of high-rises and skyscrapers. Visitors to the city at the end of the nineteenth century marveled at the "slender stone shafts incredibly rising out of the sea to pierce the sky." Five massive skyscrapers adorned the southern tip of Manhattan Island by 1898, the tallest boasting twenty-six stories. A half-century later, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the consolidation of the City of Greater New York, a commentator declared those five skyscrapers the symbol of "the strength and pride and driving ambition ofNew York."5 Throughout the "golden nineties," this captivating image attracted migrants and immigrants from around the country and the world.6 During their summer in the city, the Johnson brothers immersed themselves in New York's black bohemia, then flourishing in the old Tenderloin district in lower Manhattan. Though the trip was relatively short, it was a defining moment forJames. "These glimpses of life that I caught during our last two or three weeks in New York," he explained, "showed me a new world-an alluring world, a tempting world, a world of greatly lessened restraints, a world offascinating perils; but, above all, a world of tremendous artistic potentialities." He vowed to return as soon as possible.7 James and Rosamond made sojourns during the following two...