harlem

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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.