Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film

Chapter 2. Heaven and Hell in Harlem: Urban Aesthetics for a Renaissance People

Heaven and Hell in Harlem Urban Aesthetics for a Renaissance People NOTICE We have endeavored for some time to avoid turning over this house to colored tenants, but as a result of . . . rapid changes in conditions . . . this issue has been forced upon us. (Notice on Harlem tenement, 1910) Two snapshots of Harlem life set the stage for the following discussion of African American politics and poetics during the 1920s and ’30s, a period when large numbers of the African American population moved to northern urban areas around Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and New York City as part of the Great Migration. The first captures a moment on July 28, 1917, when, outraged by recent (and ongoing) incidents of lynching and other acts of racial violence in cities like East St. Louis, Missouri, W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson led an estimated ten thousand marchers from Harlem, down New York’s Fifth Avenue in silent protest against America’s two-tiered system of economic and social (in)justice. With muffled drums and screaming placards, marchers protested the loss of black life, voicing their unhappiness with the government. The second occurred almost two years later, on February 17, 1919, and again documents a march. This time, however, the parade moved up Fifth Avenue from 34th Street before disbanding at Lenox Avenue and 130th Street in the heart of Harlem. The men of the United States 369th Infantry Regiment (formerly the 15th Regiment of the New York National Guard), the “Harlem HellFighters ,” were returning home after distinguishing themselves in France. Led by a military band composed of show business notables, including James Reese Europe, Noble Sissle, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and other distinguished musicians and performers, the 369th was met with a hero’s welcome. It was a momentous occasion, documented by the African American and white press in 51 2 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ articles and, perhaps more important, in still and moving pictures (the march was captured by newsreel as well as still cameras). Besides their status as significant moments in Harlem’s history, these events provide clear indications of the political and social factors that influenced the area’s development as the center of African American life during the 1920s. Although they occurred before the years associated with the Harlem Renaissance, both marches marked the culmination of a shift in African American politics in the early twentieth century. Since the turn of the century, black leaders and intellectuals had sought to determine the direction that a modern, politicized, and engaged black populace would take, a direction that would not only establish a place in American culture, but that would allow black people to take an active role in the growth of the nation. With these two snapshots we see the outcome of such efforts in the form of a new, much more public presentation of African American politics, activism, and race pride. To return to 1917, Du Bois, Johnson, and the thousands marching that day were protesting events that had occurred in East St. Louis, which had recently experienced one of the “worst race riots in American history.”1 Meanwhile, on the eve of World War I, the nation’s black population was asked to contribute to the war effort at home and abroad: the former as a source of industrial labor and the latter in the armed services. East St. Louis, like many northern industrial areas, experienced a rapid growth in its African American population as MAKING A PROMISED LAND 52 FIGURE 8. The silent protest march of July 28, 1917. Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library. factories courted southern black workers as a means of cheap labor and a strategy of curtailing nascent (and sometimes not-so-nascent) unionization efforts.2 The tensions between black and white workers in the area culminated in violence resulting in the deaths of approximately one hundred black people and the destruction of hundreds of homes, churches, and stores. While East St. Louis’s African American population was indisputably the victim of white wrath, it is significant that the city’s black residents were armed and prepared to defend themselves, illustrating a momentous shift in the civil rights tactics usually voiced by the black bourgeoisie. The protest march in Harlem was also a march to fight back, though through nonviolent means. Moreover, it indicated a change in the use of photography to record...