Negro Life in New York’s Harlem: A Lively Picture of a Popular and Interesting Section by Wallace Thurman (review)

Figure 1.

Photograph taken on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street in 1939. One of the primary commercial thoroughfares in Harlem was 135th Street, where Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, and James Weldon Johnson were active as writers based in the neighborhood. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (“CCO 1.0 Dedication”).

Wallace Thurman (1902–1934) was, like James Weldon Johnson, a prominent writer during the Harlem Renaissance.¹ Thurman moved to Harlem in 1925, where he was active in publishing and editing journals that focused on questions of race and Black identity.² Like many other figures in the Harlem Renaissance, Thurman’s sexuality has been widely debated.³ The following excerpts are drawn from a short book published in 1927, Negro Life in New York’s Harlem, in which Thurman provides an overview of Black life in Harlem during the 1920s, grounded in a helpful place-based contextualization by examining New York’s geography and identifying notable spaces and institutions within the neighborhood.

The excerpts below highlight the multiplicity of identities that converged in Harlem during a period renowned for artistic innovation and creative output. Thurman underscores not only the sheer variety among Black Harlemites in terms of religion, color, class, and country of origin, but also discusses the political implications and tensions that arise from such differences. As Thurman importantly summarizes, “there is no typical American Negro”—a vital reminder for preservationists as they consider how they might tell stories about Black America. It is important to recognize the historically specific moment around Thurman’s characterization of Harlem’s diversity: the Great Migration, resulting in an unprecedented demographic movement of Black Southerners to Northern cities, along with coinciding waves of Black immigrants, turned Harlem into a place where Black people with different geographic origins, religious inclinations, and socioeconomic status converged. Thurman’s description should be considered as a reaction to and attempt to capture the intense changes that he witnessed in Harlem. Despite the particularities of Thurman’s context, his conclusion that Black Americans should not be reduced to a single entity remains apt today. How can preservation elucidate and learn from, rather than gloss over, the complexities of Black American identity?

In addition, while the conventional “claim to fame” of the Harlem Renaissance deals primarily with literature and the performing arts, Thurman challenges this limited perspective by also elaborating on the energy and prosperity that characterized other aspects of Black Harlem. Thurman, for example, describes Black entrepreneurship, social organizations, and political activism within Harlem, pointing to narratives and areas of historical inquiry that have not conventionally been associated with the Harlem Renaissance.⁴ Each of these realms in themselves contained a wide array of diverse actors, ideas, and activities. The efforts toward racial justice during the Harlem Renaissance spawned fundamental disagreements among Black activists about the means through which Black social advancement would be best attained. To cite a famous example, Du Bois advocated for Black people to strive for existing White measures of success, including university education and the accumulation of wealth, while Marcus Garvey (perhaps one of the West Indian immigrant “provocative agents and leaders in radical movements” Thurman had in mind in writing that passage) rejected Du Bois’s conformation to capitalist ideals in favor of the establishment of self-sufficient Black institutions and society in line with Black racial pride. To flatten these contradictions that coexisted, clashed, and influenced each other during the Harlem Renaissance essentializes its legacy, and fails to capture its complexity. Of course, the reductive presentation of history is not limited to the Harlem Renaissance—preservationists can benefit from texts like Thurman’s that give more depth to our historical understanding of a particular time and place. There is much in Thurman’s account that...