Author: MAYA ALEXANDER

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145th & Frederick Douglass Blvd.

 My old stomping grounds…145th and Frederick Douglass Blvd.

I was born and spent most of my childhood living in Harlem (145th & Frederick Douglass Blvd. to be exact) something that I will always cherish about living there was the sense of community. As a young kid, I spent hours outside with my older siblings and friends ripping through the neighborhood streets and parks, and on nearly every block there was someone that we knew and could talk to. This community-based lifestyle is seemingly an ongoing thread when it comes to Harlem living. When looking through the archives of images and publications written about the Harlem of the 1920s and 30s, it’s clear that is where this sense of community began. The vibrant neighborhood was awash with a true community of artists, writers, working-class laborers, musicians, etc. whose roots were maintained through to my own Harlem experience in the mid to late 2000s. Although I haven’t been back to my part of Harlem in about four or five years, I am extremely interested to see if gentrification has had any effect in breaking up that sense of community that to me is such an essential part of life in Harlem. Is the current gentrification cycle ripping its way through Harlem and other Black neighborhoods significant in the overall theme of Black reinvention? My blog posts mostly consider this theme through the lens of the Harlem Renaissance time period, but I think there are some interesting thoughts on this topic when adding in a contemporary lens. A large part of the reinvention in the 1920s was having Harlem be this central point throughout the Blak diaspora. Now that Harlem is being broken up it will be interesting to see if there will be another Black “mecca” that arises. And if so, what would be its goal.  

 

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Harlem: A Black Mecca

 A Southern family heads north during the first wave of the Great Migration.

The Harlem Renneasiacce was in part defined by the creative and intellectual output spanning the likes of theater, literature, music, etc. And while that creative output makes up the parts of the defining era, at the center of the movement and why it was so successful was the physical location which became representative of the era in more ways than one. Harlem, which at its flattest, is just one of the many neighborhoods clustered together across Manhattan. At the start of the Harlem Rennesaiacce, the social conditions of the country caused a major influx of Black people domestically and abroad to create the beginnings of what Alain Locke calls, a Black “mecca”. This begs to question, did the people moving to the neighborhood understand the grand significance of the event? And furthermore, how did Harlem grow beyond the strident definition of what a neighborhood could be?

 “The New Negro Has No Fear” reads a sign at a 1920 parade organized by the United Negro Improvement Association.

In “Harlem” by Alain Locke, there seem to be two reckonings of what the neighborhood of Harlem is meant to represent and how it is supposed to function as a result of this newly christened representation. The first continues an overarching theme of the Harlem Renaissance period which is a revitalization of the Black identity. This revitalization came in the form of what was known as “The New Negro” movement. The first wave of the Great Migration saw Harlem seized as the center or even more pointedly, the mecca, of a new Black culture and identity. The second reckoning discovers the purpose and functionality of understanding the neighborhood of Harlem to be representative of the New Negro movement. In the first several paragraphs of the essay, Locke touches on three different versions of Harlem. The first is the Harlem that the majority of New York sees, “it is a black belt and nothing more,” Locke laments in his first description (629). The second Harlem is “the Harlem of the newspapers” which grotesquely distorts the reality of Harlem living with outlandish tales of “shufflin’ ” “rollin’ ” parties and entertainment hubs. The third version, however, rejects the charges of insignificance and overzealous characterizations. Locke describes this third Harlem as being “neither slum, ghetto, resort or colony, though it is in part all of them” (629). This Harlem is the Harlem meant to shelter revitalization, meant to sustain the movement, it should be viewed not as just a mecca but “a race capital” (629). The designation as a race capital displays how Harlem was meant to function as a representative of the reclaiming of the Black identity. Akin to the role that European cities like Prague and Dublin played in creating “ New Chzecholslavikia” and a “New Ireland,” Harlem, which at that time saw the largest surge of Black migration not just domestically but across the African diaspora with what Locke calls, “the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life,” became that first race capital for Black people across the diaspora (630). Harlem was able to defy traditional notions of what a neighborhood should be by evolving beyond that. Harlem was (and some might argue still is) one of the global signifiers of Blackness at its most reinvigorated. 

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The Weary Blues and Social Progress

 “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes as it appeared in Opportunity Magazine

Something striking about Opportunity Magazine is the way that it is formatted. Poems, essays, and illustrations all follow one another throughout the magazine to create a seamless archive of Black achievements. One of those illustrations that seemed particularly significant appeared in the September 1925 issue of Opportunity. The illustration was drawn by Charles Robinson, and it is an artistic depiction of a Langston Hughes poem called, “The Weary Blues.” The Hughes poem had appeared in an earlier 1925 edition of Opportunity and it had won a literary contest deeming it the best poem of the year. The Robinson drawing is interesting not just for the poem that it is representing, but also for where it is placed within the context of the magazine. 

Opportunity Magazine was normally split into several sections. The most common of which was, “Editorials,” “Articles,” “Poetry,” and “Social Progress.” The social progress section was the one that hit most directly with the purpose of Opportunity. The purpose of the magazine, according to Gloria Grant Roberson author of The World of Toni Morrison: A Guide to Characters and Places in Her Novels, was to “combat inferiority by bringing positive news to and about black people.” (101) The social progress section of Opportunity directly addresses this goal. The September 1925 issue where the Robinson illustration appears features Black social progress stories within the world of agriculture, education, and segregation. These positive stories however seem in sharp contrast to the Robison illustration that directly follows these achievements in the magazine. 

 Illustration by Charles Robinson

The drawing features a completely blacked-out background which places the focus on a blues pianist who is hunched over a piano with the only light in the image coming from a single lamp cast directly over the man and the piano. Even without knowing the context of the poem, it was inspired by, the image is not a particularly joyous one. The overall darkness of the drawing creates feelings of despair and loneliness. These feelings are only heightened when compared to Hughes’ writing. The poem, “The Weary Blues,” is written from the point of view of a piano player who is singing a blues song in a Harlem nightclub. Hughes writes that the player was able to make “that poor piano moan with melody.” Later on, Hughes provides some of the lyrics of the song the old musician was singing: 

“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,

Ain’t got nobody but ma self.

I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’

And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

 Set right in the middle of the Harlem Renniansse the song helps to contextualize some of the feelings behind the movement. While the period was one of great social strides and progress it was also a time where Black people found new ways to display their suffering brought on by their treatment by white society. When the piano player sings that he has to “quit ma frowin’” he speaks on the suppression of Black pain in a way that can be digested by everyone, which is through song. This reckoning makes the placement of the Robinson drawing even more impactful. While Opportunity Magazine understood the importance of highlighting Black achievements and progress, it also provided ample space to remind readers of the realities of the Black experience in the United States. The juxtaposition of the image and the text is almost relaying the message that while having Black social progress is important it must always be understood that this progress is happening within a white world that does not put any stake into the achievements of Black people.

This understanding of the need to create a space where Black people could unabashedly celebrate their achievements while simultaneously acknowledging the social conditions that made that space necessary to begin with, makes the context surrounding “The Weary Blues” poem even more significant. In a chapter from a larger work entitled, Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is described as being “the brightest and most-recognized star of the Harlem Renaissance.” (56) This recognition was born out of Hughes’ ability to both creatively and authentically highlight various and complex facets of Black life in the United States. Something interesting however comes with the reactions to Hughes’ poem. “The Weary Blues” is one of Hughes’ earlier and more recognizable works. His intention with the poem according to Harlem Renaissance was to, “write in an authentic, personal voice that also spoke for other African Americans, in whose varied lives he was intensely interested.” The reactions from the Black elite of the time, specifically what W.E.B. Du Bois referred to as the Talented Tenth, was of objection. Those Black people who were a part of the Black intellectual elite “complained that Hughes’s writing only reinforced white stereotypes about African American life.” This is particularly interesting when considering the goals of Du Bois’ own magazine, The Crisis. While Opportunity Magazine reveled at the chance to highlight the achievements, Crisis was more geared toward the reinvention of the Black experience with the advancements of the New Negro movement leading the way. This reinvention took great pains to separate anything negative or stereotypical about Black people away from the New Negro. The fact that the Hughes poem was published in Opportunity shows contention around the representation of Black people and their experiences at the time. The two contrasting viewpoints from the two most significant Black publications at the time highlight that there wasn’t just a single salient belief about how to represent the Black experience. 

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DuBois and the Cover Conflict

 A mother and her child

Looking through the covers of The Crisis it is clear that this publication was meant to do at least one thing. The first was reinvention. At the turn of the 20th century, Black Americans saw themselves longing to create a new public image that decentered the stereotypes of the “Sambo” or the “Zip Coon”. Both of which were images of Black people that were cemented into the minds of white society in an attempt to further dehumanize and infantilize Black people in a post-Reconstruction era. Henry Louis Gates in “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black”, talked extensively about the creation of “The New Negro” image that was meant to reclaim the presentation of the Black identity. Once Black people were in control of their own identity then they could manipulate it. And according to Gates, “to manipulate the image of the black was, in a sense, to manipulate reality. The Public Negro Self, therefore, was an entity to be crafted” (137).  This manipulation of reality in a sense was placing Black people into the confines of white respectability. Shifting back to The Crisis covers, W.E.B. Du Bois’ instance on shifting the image of Black people from the “racist caricatures of “ ‘grinning’ Negroes, ‘happy’ Negroes, ‘gold dust twins,’ ‘Aunt Jemimas,’ [and] ‘solid’ headed tacks” (Harris 82), led instead to an overrepresentation of the Black bourgeoisie class that Du Bois wanted the magazine’s readership to aspire to. The covers many of which feature Black scholars, athletes, soldiers, parents, and children alike, were meant to act as the new public representation of Black society. 

 A Black graduate graces the cover of Crisis.

With such an intense focus placed on the visual, it seemed inevitable that “The New Negro” movement would spawn creative and vivid ways of showcasing this new Black identity through music, art, poetry, etc. Du Bois’ vision of “The New Negro” however became a point of contention, especially when assessing who he chose to represent this new ideal of Blackness on the covers of The Crisis magazine. In the article, “Printing the Color Line in The Crisis,” Donal Harris notes how Du Bois’ passion for “aesthetic conservatism” reflected in who he put on the cover, usually higher society, light-skinned, educated women and men (88). It would not be hard to classify this as intentional on Du Bois’ part. A large part of “The New Negro” movement was visual representation and the only way to standardize this new Black image would be to limit and even denounce anything that was representative of “lower-class Harlem life” (88).

 Yet, as a counter to this critique, Du Bois and as a result, The Crisis and its covers were faced with tackling new issues of representation. For years, Black people had been made into caricatures by songs or books. The Crisis, therefore, was in a new position to represent “race in print” by a for Black people (86). Du Bois, through The Crisis covers, wanted to “re-present [African Americans’] public selves” and the most efficient way of doing this was by displaying the Black bourgeois class front and center while tackling the complexities of this within the pages of the magazine (86).