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3. Harlem Renaissance Women and 580 St. Nicholas Avenue When Regina’s interviewer at the New York Public Library told her that she was not American, Regina recalled that she was “quite startled because I never had this confrontation in Chicago.” With fewer African Americans in Chicago than in New York City, the Chicago Public Library hired more African Americans to work in its libraries as a result of the civil service system , which hired and placed people based upon their scores on the exam regardless of race.1 Her New York Public Library interviewer concluded, “Because of your color . . . we’ll have to send you to Harlem to work.” He assumed Regina knew Harlem and asked whether she had a place there. She replied that she “hadn’t been to Harlem,” because she “hadn’t had occasion to go up there.” Regina’s job at the New York Public Library was actually not her first in New York City. She took a job briefly in the Womrath Rental Library, an experience she said she “liked very much [because the work was] . . . quite different from [that of] a public library.”2 Rental libraries flourished during the 1920s through the 1940s. By 1935, there were about 50,000 nationwide. Most were located in drugstores, card stores, and gift shops and rented both fiction and nonfiction, although most emphasized fiction because public libraries often frowned upon patrons reading too much fiction: “The larger rental libraries . . . were exhorted to have a library clerk or two with a friendly extroverted character who enjoyed reading and who followed book reviews. The ‘librarian ’ should be someone who was good at chatting about books with patrons and willing to recommend selections.”3 While working at Womrath, Regina took a vacation, which included a sightseeing trip to Boston, and applied for a job at NYPL upon her return to the city. Harlem Renaissance Women and 580 St. Nicholas Avenue 33 At the time, Regina resided in the YWCA near the 42nd Street Branch in midtown Manhattan and not at the YWCA in Harlem, where most African Americans found a place to stay when they arrived in New York City.4 Either Regina was unfamiliar with this practice, or she felt at home in the non–African American YWCA. It’s possible the proprietors did not know that she was not white. Her NYPL interviewer suggested that she “find a friend” to live with in Harlem. She called her married friend Inez Wilson, who had a first-floor apartment where Regina could live. In Wil Haygood’s biography of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson he described two types of Harlems inhabited by African Americans. Robinson’s family lived on the side that was “darker and unforgiving . . . a rough place, a lower-class enclave of broken families, of flophouses and boardinghouses. Of racketeers and gangsters, of big crime and petty crime. Of handouts and hand-me-down clothing, of little boys often scampering about like lambs being hunted.”5 In the other Harlem, wrote Haygood, “[T]here were poetry readings and social teas; there were gatherings that featured notable speakers who talked about national affairs and the doings they were privy to in the Roosevelt White House. . . . In this Harlem there was music by the Harlem Symphony; there were NAACP galas and fraternity soirees. . . . That was the bright side of the two-sided coin of Harlem.” This was the Harlem that Regina and the friends she made through the library inhabited. They were not that interested in events in the other Harlem, such as the political movement of Marcus Garvey, the controversial leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Regina and her circle could not help but notice the “parades of the Garvey Movement, but most of our group just laughed at the idea. . . . [W]e didn’t know the real significance of it. . . . [W]e were too busy living our lives and . . . being interested in the . . . movement . . . [w]hich they now call the [Harlem] Renaissance.”6 Events collided to put Regina at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement marked by increased literary, musical, and artistic creativity by African American artists who wanted to challenge the prevailing stereotypical representation of their image. Writers and artists came from all over the United States to participate. In Los Angeles, writer Wallace Thurman encouraged fellow post-office worker Arna Bontemps to go to Harlem. Opportunity editor Charles S. Johnson encouraged Zora Neale Hurston to move to New York City...

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