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1. Boy to Man
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 1 . Boy to Man Palmer Cooper, twenty-two, a World War I army veteran, married Irma Cathlee Robinson, twenty-four, of Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 1920, in New York City. They lived on 133rd Street in Harlem and attended St. Mark’s United Methodist Church.1 The Coopers were black, and as Harlem residents they lived in the center of black America. They were married at the time of the Harlem Renaissance . Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston lived and worked there during the twenties.2 Duke Ellington and his orchestra entertained white customers at the Cotton Club.3 W. E. B. Du Bois lived uptown, too, and he edited the Crisis magazine, then the militant and literary journal of the NAACP.The Crisis’s journalistic rival was Opportunity magazine,published by the National Urban League.4 The Coopers lived in a community that was the home base of the 369th Harlem Hell Fighters, the World War I heroes who were celebrated for their bravery by the French government but shunned by the United States during an era of Jim Crow segregation.5 The Harlem that the Coopers lived in was a ghetto. Most blacks in New York City were packed into apartment houses and brownstones in a neighborhood that had originally been intended to be an upper-middle-class white suburb of Manhattan.6 When the Coopers settled uptown, Harlem was evolving into a slum. During the 1920s, New York City’s black population increased 115 percent, from 152,467 to 327,706 residents. The overwhelming share of those new arrivals were packed in Harlem. Meanwhile, for the first time since the Dutch settlers claimed Manhattan in the 1600s, the population of the island declined. First- and second-generation white immigrants left to live in the city’s outer boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.7 The year that the Coopers were married, 1920, was a momentous one in the city. Mamie Smith became the first black woman to perform on a record when she sang “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down” for New York’s Okeh label.Also that year, Marcus M. Garvey held the first convention of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, addressing twenty-five thousand of his followers in Madison Square Garden. James Weldon Johnson, one of the 4 Boy to man most prominent writers of the Harlem Renaissance, became executive secretary of the NAACP, the first black to hold that position. Palmer and Irma began making babies.Their first child,Palma,was born on April 30, 1921. The Coopers intended to name their son Palmer; however, city officials misspelled the boy’s name on the birth certificate. The Bureau of Records refused to correct the misspelling despite several requests by the mother and father,so Palma,the modified name,stuck.8 Milton was born on February 12, 1923. Early in 1927, Irma was with child again. The family was already crammed into their small apartment. In addition to husband, wife, and two sons, Palmer’s mother, Louise Marie Schofield, was a member of the household .9 The anticipated child would grow the family to six members. It was time to move to more open space. It was time to move thirteen miles south to Brooklyn.10 When the Coopers moved to 350 Grand Avenue in the Clinton Hill neighborhood, they were among the black arrivals to Brooklyn who more than doubled the African American population between 1920 and 1930. At the start of the Roaring Twenties, 31,912 blacks represented 1.6 percent of the more than two million Brooklynites. By 1930, 68,921 blacks were living in Brooklyn and represented 2.7 percent of the population.11 Andrew Wells Cooper was born on August 21, 1927, at the house on Grand between Greene and Gates avenues. The baby shared the first name of Palmer’s sibling, who lived on the block near the family. Brooklyn,originally called Breuckelen by the Dutch settlers,was a rural village community across the East River from urban Manhattan.Even in the twenty-first century, some Brooklynites still describe their subway excursions to Manhattan as“going to the city.” Brooklyn was colonized by Dutch settlers in 1636, a dozen years after setting foot on Manhattan Island to trade furs with the Native Indians. For decades Dutch and British settlers invited by the Dutch West India Company coexisted in New Netherlands (Manhattan) and across the East River in what is now...