Harlem Stomp! Read online

  Text copyright © 2003 by Laban Carrick Hill

  Cover illustration copyright © 2003 by Christopher Myers

  Foreword copyright © 2003 by Nikki Giovanni

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: January 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-04048-8

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Song of Smoke: The Smoldering Black Consciousness, 1900 – 1910

  Moving Out, Fighting Back: The Great Migration, Organizing for Freedom, and World War I, 1911 –1920

  Black Metropolis: The Rise of Harlem, 1900–1920

  The Dam Breaking: Jean Toomer, Claude Mckay, and Opportunity in the Arts, 1921–1924

  Fire!!: An Explosion of Creativity

  Dark Tower: A Social Breakthrough

  Stompin’ at the Savoy: Music and Dance of the Renaissance

  Heritage Unbound: Blacks and the American Theater

  Against All Odds Against: Visual Artists and their Struggle for Recognition

  Rage in the Streets: The Waning of the Renaissance and the Beginning of the Harlem Riots

  Bibliography

  Credits

  Biographies

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Without Elise Whittemore-Hill and her support, insight, and incredible design, this book would not be what it is today. I would also like to thank Susan Cohen for her criticism and amazing faith, Megan Tingley for her superb editing, Jennifer Hunt for her outstanding editing and guidance to make this book happen, Alyssa Morris for her great art direction, Alvina Ling for her excellent editorial work, and Christine Cuccio for her eagle eye and unerring copyediting. Dr. Lorrie Smith, St. Michaels College, provided support and criticism from the first idea for this book through to the last draft of the manuscript. Dr. Emily Bernard, University of Vermont, provided a wizened pair of eyes by reading the final manuscript and ensuring its accuracy. Finally, I’d like to thank the people who make writing worthwhile: Susan Thames, Joy Tomchin, and my daughters Natalie and Ella.

  Harlem Plains before development, 1812.

  Nail and Parker’s “Big Deal,” W. 113th St., 1915.

  FOREWORD

  One of the most exciting periods in American History, if not in the history of the world, is the Harlem Renaissance. In the early part of the twentieth century, Harlem was a hotbed of intellectual, artistic, literary, and political blossoming for Black people. In response to the Black codes that were designed to undo the progressive 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, the Black population started voting with its feet and walking away from the brutality and hardships of the South. One can almost hear them ask, “ Shall we gather at the river?” before they marched to the North. No matter what price they might have to pay, gather they did. They came to St. Louis, Chicago, and ultimately to Harlem seeking peace, prosperity and freedom. Stepping out on faith, they both preserved and created a culture. A people who were chattel only a generation earlier took over the cultural quilt of America and warmed the world.

  It is an amazing piece of propaganda that Black people were lazy. Aside from the obvious impossibility that a slave cannot be alive and lazy, the fact is Blacks have worked, and worked hard and successfully, in every field of endeavor they have been allowed to pursue. What a crazy irony that the people who had faithfully cleared the forest and planted the very crops that would be staples of the young country, who had valiantly fought in each war, who had remained good and faithful friends through natural and manmade disasters, were now subject to unspeakable crimes. Blacks—who were lynched, bombed, and burned out by Whites for trying to exercise basic citizenship rights, and then had to watch those same terrorists claim that Blacks were not able and did not want to vote, go to school, or participate in the life of the community and country—were aghast at the blasphemy. Blacks had had enough. They left for the cities. They left for their physical and emotional well-being. They left to give their children a better chance.

  There can be no doubt that they were scared. They had nothing but their great hearts, which had carried them through two hundred of the darkest years of Euro-American history. How these years came to be years of shame for Black people is beyond understanding. It is not we who kidnapped, raped, and ravished a people. It is not we who continue to struggle against equality and opportunity.

  The Harlem Renaissance is a testament to Black people’s perseverance. It’s a sounding call of Black innovation, freedom, and creativity. In music, the Harlem Renaissance brought together a gaggle of Blacks who sang their plantation songs and then made a variation called blues and then made a variation called jazz. The Spirituals and jazz are now considered American music, but that can only be true if Blacks are an American people.

  The Renaissance can also be viewed through its literature. It was a great literature that was nurtured and created. Countee Cullen poignantly remembered a visit to Baltimore; Claude McKay in his famous poem “If We Must Die” demanded, “if we must die let it not be like hogs”; Zora Neale Hurston brought her keen observations to life and laughed at everybody; and the incomparable Langston Hughes wanted ultimately to know “What Happens to a Dream Deferred?” In his beautiful and eloquent poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes, like his peers, found the voice of justice, the voice of hope, and put it into words that others would hear, identify with, and understand. Visual artists, such as Aaron Douglas, had to overcome the negative images that had been perpetuated during slavery and Reconstruction. Movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind had to be countered with true images of a people struggling to find a place for themselves in a nation ashamed of its past. Harlem Stomp! celebrates these brave and wonderful people. Harlem Stomp! finds both truth and joy in the struggle of rebirth. Harlem Stomp! is an American history of an American people redefining this great American nation.

  —NIKKI GIOVANNI

  Aaron Douglas illustration from December 1925 Opportunity cover.

  SONG OF SMOKE

  THE SMOLDERING BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS, 1900 – 1910

  I am the Smoke King

  I am black!

  ...........

  I will be black as blackness can —

  The blacker the mantle, the mightier the man!

  My purpl’ing midnights no day dawn may ban.

  — W. E. B. DU BOIS, from “The Song of Smoke”

  FUELING THE EMBERS OF BLACK PRIDE

  IN THE 1920S, Harlem was hot! The streets were crowded. The nightclubs were hoppin’. The theaters were packed to the rafters. And the poems and stories crackled with racial pride. Without a doubt Harlem was the center of the universe if you were black or just a white hepcat from downtown who knew where the action was. Nineteen twenties Harlem represented the coming of age for African Americans. And that time would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.

  “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line — the relation of the darker races to the lighter races of men.”

  — W. E. B. Du Bois

  Booker T. Washington was a member of the older generation, born into slavery, who believed racial agitation was a course for disaster.

  The renaissance, however, didn’t just blare out of Louis Armstrong’s horn or spill from Langston Hughes’s pen. The Harlem Renaissance was the culmination of a change in attitude that had begun two decades earlier. It was a shift in philosophy from a
ccommodating white domination to demanding equal status and recognition for blacks. Critic W. E. B. Du Bois (doo-BOYZ) became one of the major voices of this new attitude when he first stated plainly the conflict that was to define much of the twentieth century in his groundbreaking book The Souls of Black Folk: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line — the relation of the darker races to the lighter races of men. . . .” When Du Bois wrote these words in 1902, they were not simply controversial. They were as radical as any statement a black man ever made publicly, because Du Bois was saying clearly that blacks could not be ignored any longer.

  Since the emancipation of slaves in 1863, the traditional doctrine of race relations was one of accommodation. For blacks that meant: Don’t make any waves and you won’t be lynched. (“Lynch” means to put someone to death by mob action without legal authority.) Booker T. Washington, the most prominent African American at the time, strongly supported the principle of nonconfrontation. In his famous speech at the Atlanta Exposition on September 18, 1895, he said:

  “The wisest among my race understands that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.”

  Washington was a practical man. When he looked at African Americans, he saw a people barely able to survive. To his logic, what African Americans needed most were jobs, not equality. They needed to put food on the table and pay the rent. Consequently, he founded Tuskegee Normal School (now Tuskegee University), which trained blacks for jobs as teachers and later as maids, carpenters, and other manual laborers. Washington believed that to pursue any higher learning was not only impractical but dangerous for blacks.

  Chicago Defender political cartoon of Booker T. Washington doing the “Buck and Wing” minstrel dance for a white audience.

  A member of the first generation of blacks to have been born free, as well as the first African American ever to receive a Ph.D., Du Bois was deeply offended by what he saw as Washington’s surrender. Du Bois stated flatly that it “wasn’t enough to teach Negroes trades, the Negro had to have some voice in their government, had to have protection in the courts, and they had to have men to lead them.” He believed that the future prosperity of blacks in America lay in men and women like himself — educated African Americans. He coined the term “Talented Tenth” to describe the ten percent of the black population who were educated and relatively affluent. In his famous essay, “The Talented Tenth,” Du Bois argued: “Education must not simply teach work — it must teach Life. The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.”

  Many black intellectuals echoed Du Bois’s radical sentiment. William Monroe Trotter, founder of Boston’s Guardian newspaper, and Robert S. Abbott, founder of Chicago’s Defender paper — both black newspapers — took up the banner of equality in their newspapers and regularly lampooned Booker T. Washington as a puppet of whites.

  W. E. B. Du Bois was the leader of the new generation, born free, who believed the only way to win equal rights was to fight for them.

  AUTHENTIC BLACKNESS

  WHAT IS BLACK? At the turn of the century blacks were referred to among polite white company as Negroes. But the term was clearly used by whites to mean ignorant, unskilled, rural, and Southern. In short, African

  Americans were considered all-around inferior. W. E. B. Du Bois and other young African Americans were angered and deeply hurt by this stereotype. They only had to look at themselves to see how wrong that caricature was. They were born free, were educated, and had little connection to the Southern myth of the “Negro.” Du Bois himself was a highly educated, Northern-born intellectual who was extremely proud of his accomplishments. As he and his peers looked out at American culture, they saw no representation of their black selves. They argued that it was impossible to make conclusions about African Americans en masse because not all blacks look alike or think alike or live alike or even worship alike.

  The consequence of the emerging black pride was a tremendous push to act on the dramatic shift in thinking. Blacks began creating their own organizations to free themselves not only from white expectations but also from white control.

  A BLACK WOMAN SPEAKS, 1902

  “I am a colored woman, wife and mother. I have lived all my life in the South, and have often thought what a peculiar fact it is that the more ignorant the Southern whites are of us the more vehement they are in their denunciation of us. They boast that they have little intercourse with us, never see us in our homes, churches or places of amusement, but still they know us thoroughly.”

  — Anonymous, New York’s Independent

  THE MINSTREL MYTH: WHAT BLACK WAS MISTAKEN FOR

  At the turn of the century minstrel shows toured every corner of the United States. These shows were comprised primarily of white performers “blacking up” to imitate African Americans. The shows falsely claimed to represent “authentic” blackness, but in reality they merely perpetuated the stereotype of the ignorant, happy-go-lucky, dancing “Nigger” — an extremely demeaning term used primarily by whites to refer to African Americans. The origins of these offensive shows are complex and difficult to untangle, but clearly they resulted from the deep misunderstandings that whites had of blacks. Originally, slaves would mock their masters by performing broad, slapstick imitations of them. They called it “puttin’ on ole massa” (“massa” meant “master”). Dances like the “Cake Walk,” a formal march in which a black man with a beribboned cane led two couples in a “dignified” strut, and the “Buck and Wing,” a classic tap dance step, were created to lampoon white pretensions. When whites witnessed these antics, however, they completely missed the ridicule intended and assumed that these performances were representations of authentic black culture. Whites in turn mocked and ridiculed the supposed naïve and simple-minded ways of black folk for entertainment. The irony of minstrel shows is that whites would put on black faces to imitate blacks imitating whites.

  A poster for a popular minstrel show around 1900.

  From 1900 to 1905:

  • Twenty-eight black-owned banks were formed.

  • The National League for the Protection of Colored Women was organized to combat unethical practices by Northern employment agencies.

  • The Atlanta Life Insurance Company, the first black insurance business, was founded.

  • The National Liberty Party, an all-black national political organization, was formed.

  • Numerous African American newspapers, including Boston’s Guardian and Chicago’s Defender, were founded.

  By virtue of their existence, these organizations and many others exploded the old stereotypes. How could anyone think of African Americans as ignorant Southern laborers when they were running banks and insurance companies, organizing social agencies and political parties, and publishing newspapers across America? Blacks could no longer be limited by class, education, or geography.

  STAND UP, SPEAK OUT!

  IN THE WINTER of 1905, Du Bois composed a letter inviting key individuals — teachers, physicians, lawyers, ministers, and a few businessmen — to a meeting to plan action. It was time for the next step in the fight for equal rights.

  The original leaders of the Niagara Movement in 1905, in a photo taken on the Canadian side of the Falls, with Du Bois second from right in the second row.

  The time seems more than ripe for organized, determined, and aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth. Movements are on foot threatening individual freedom and our self respect. I write to you to propose a conference during the coming summer for the following purposes:

  I. To oppose firmly the present methods of strangling honest criticism, manipulating public opinion and centralizing political power by means of the improper and corrupt use of money and influence.

  II. To organize thoroughly the intelligent and honest Negroes throughout the United States for the purpose of insisting on manhood rights, industrial opportunity and spir
itual freedom.

  III. To establish and support proper organs of news and public opinion.

  If you are in accord with the above objects will you kindly write me at your earliest opportunity as to whether or not you can join the movement indicated in the enclosed circular?

  VIOLENCE’S TEMPORARY TRIUMPH

  Evidence of the Niagara Movement’s ineffectuality could be found in the streets across America. Between the years of 1900 and 1909 nearly every attempt by blacks to assert their rights was met by some of the most violent race riots in the nation’s history. With the spread of riots to the North, it was clear that racism was no longer just a Southern problem.

  Between 1889 and 1918, 2,522 blacks were lynched. In many communities, blacks had no legal protection against violence.

  1900

  NEW ORLEANS

  Race riot erupts and lasts five days. A black school and 30 black homes burned.

  NEW YORK CITY

  Race riot, one black man killed by police. Not a single white arrested.

  1903

  GEORGIA

  Whites attack blacks in response to a rumor that blacks had murdered whites.

  1904

  SPRINGFIELD, OH

  A black man shoots and kills a white police officer. Whites break into the jail and lynch him, then destroy the black section of town.

  STATESBORO, GA

  White mob terrorizes blacks. Two men are lynched, two women whipped, and a young mother beaten and killed while her husband is also murdered.

  1905

  NEW YORK CITY

  Race riot erupts, stemming from police abuse of black citizens.

  1906

  SPRINGFIELD, OH

  Race riot erupts, the second in two years.