Abstract
Harlem may be the most famous urban neighborhood in the world. Most people have heard of it, and many can also probably reference some aspect of its history (such as Harlem’s importance as a center of African American culture). Given the neighborhood’s prominence, the scholarly research on Harlem is not as varied as it perhaps could be. However, three recent monographs add new perspectives to the history of Harlem, connecting the neighborhood to trends in urban history scholarship such as community activism and the role of real estate in neighborhood formation. These three volumes offer perspectives and interpretations about Harlem that contribute to a fuller understanding of the neighborhood and its history. They also suggest that Harlem’s history is more complex than the standard white flight-Harlem Renaissance-ghetto formation-gentrification timeline often associated with the history of the neighborhood.
Kevin McGruder’s Race and Real Estate offers a compelling discussion about Harlem’s transformation into an African American neighborhood. McGruder discredits several common assumptions about Harlem’s history. The first is that upon the arrival of blacks in the neighborhood, whites immediately rose in violent resistance to the newcomers. Failing to prevent this incursion, white residents fled Harlem in large numbers (one might call this the standard “white flight” paradigm). Second is that black Harlemites were pawns to rapacious landlords and real estate speculators, who charged blacks higher rents due to the limited housing options available to African Americans. As a result, economic imperatives motivated landlords to evict whites out of Harlem real estate to make way for black renters. Race and Real Estate challenges these interpretations. While some white residents of Harlem reacted belligerently toward the arrival of blacks in the neighborhood, others were far less pessimistic, living alongside the new arrivals and entering into business transactions with them. McGruder argues that Harlem’s history during this period suggests that race relations in urban areas were not as “monolithic” (p. 60) as might typically be assumed and that “the success of black property owners in acquiring control of properties . . . could not have occurred without the cooperation of white property owners and lenders” (p. 60).
McGruder also illustrates the concept of agency and how African Americans moving into Harlem were not simply the victims of white landlords intent on profiting from the segregation in New York’s housing market. Rather, as he eloquently states, African Americans used “economic power to secure their rights” (p. 59). Careful examination of real estate transactions shows that blacks played a prominent role in transforming Harlem by purchasing property in the neighborhood and engaging in speculative real estate investment in the area.
McGruder’s narrative begins by noting the limited housing opportunities available to African Americans in New York. Most were typically confined to declining areas such as the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill. What is unique about Harlem is that it was an ascending community with quality housing and room for new development. New housing also meant that the population of white residents were more diverse and less dedicated to the neighborhood than might otherwise have been the case. Consequently, when blacks began moving into Harlem, the response of whites living in the area was more varied than in other areas. Although some whites resorted to the typical tactics of violence, protest, and recourse to restrictive covenants, others willingly sold property to and entered into business arrangements with African Americans. McGruder suggests that the community’s newness played a role in this, as did the fact that white sellers may have identified with black buyers who came from the same social and professional classes that they did. He also theorizes that the diversity of Harlem’s white ethnic groups also facilitated these transactions. Germans, especially, had no compunction against selling to blacks. The important conclusion that emerges here is that the African Americans that moved into Harlem played an active role in shaping the community by utilizing the real estate market to their advantage.
Having established how real estate played a prominent role in facilitating the transformation of Harlem to an African American community, McGruder addresses other factors that completed this process. He provides an excellent discussion of the idea of neighborhood formation and the how different elements must coalesce to create a true urban community, as an urban neighborhood is more than just housing. One area where this was evident was church properties. As Harlem’s racial demographics changed, white churches felt increased economic pressure as their congregations moved away, while demand for black churches increased as more African Americans moved in. Much as blacks moved to Harlem from other parts of the city, so, too, did black churches. McGruder finds that whites were much more reluctant to sell church properties to blacks, arguing that “church real estate represented a symbol of permanency and community for white residents . . . they were signs of community control” (p. 98). White residents often sought to maintain control of their churches even in the face of ongoing black migration into the area and that “the white response to attempts by African Americans was uniformly one of great reluctance” (p. 117). Although blacks eventually acquired churches in Harlem, white congregations typically sold their property to an individual acting as a middleman, who then sold to a black congregation. The end result was the same, however, in that the growth of African American churches represented another sign that Harlem was becoming a black community. McGruder further outlines the process of community formation, focusing on the construction of youth centers in Harlem and how African Americans in the community mobilized their political power and supported their own candidates for elective office. McGruder concludes that as a result of these changes “the basic elements of the formation of Harlem as a black community with churches, newspapers, political aspirants, youth organizations, and property owners was clearly evident” (p. 215).
As the title of Race and Real Estate indicates, property is central to the arguments found in the book. African Americans’ participation in the real estate market through the purchase of homes, churches, commercial properties, and apartments effected the transformation of Harlem into a unique area in which blacks controlled important aspects of their community for the first time. McGruder also shows that Harlem does not fit the usual template associated with the movement of blacks into a white community, and that whites’ responses to the changing neighborhood were varied and diverse. Race and Real Estate is a valuable study that provides a compelling discussion about how and why urban neighborhoods change. Indeed, McGruder provides an model for further research into other urban neighborhoods and how they change over time. He also highlights the importance of private property in American life and how the acquisition of property helped African Americans acquire a measure of autonomy and independence in a city that long discriminated against them. The originality of the research design and the importance of its conclusions indicate that Race and Real Estate is a valuable and unique work of scholarship that adds considerably to the scholarly literature on New York City specifically, and to urban history more generally.
Shannon King’s Whose Harlem Is This Anyway? picks up where Race and Real Estate leaves off. King’s narrative begins in the 1920s after Harlem had become an African American community. Where Race and Real Estate focused primarily on economic issues, Whose Harlem? discusses Harlem as a center of political activism. As King notes, the book “considers individual, collective, and organized forms of political activity by focusing on the range of blacks’ responses to neighborhood issues” (p. 6). Whose Harlem? demonstrates that political awareness was an early feature of the community and that Harlem’s African American residents rapidly mobilized against New York City’s entrenched discriminatory practices. This is perhaps the most important conclusion to emerge from the book, as African American political activism is typically associated with the period after World War II. King shows that Harlem and its African American residents were politically active long before this. Harlemites’ political activities illustrate how “blacks established community politics that challenged racial injustice in Harlem and forged a political infrastructure that was foundational for black political and radical activity throughout the 1930s and beyond” (p. 12).
King’s narrative moves in a thematic fashion. He argues that Harlem’s political activism can be identified in three areas —housing, civil rights, and social reform - that taken together represent the “origins of Harlem community rights” (p. 14). King is especially interested in the notion of “community politics” and how Harlem residents, as members of the most prominent African American neighborhood in the country, stood at the forefront of a movement to combat racism and discrimination in New York City. The book begins with a discussion about labor and the efforts of African Americans to challenge entrenched discriminatory practices in this area. Blacks in New York were typically consigned to menial jobs (such as elevator operators), were prevented from obtaining work in New York’s manufacturing sector, and were barred from joining unions that provided access to the city’s profitable building trades. Here, King seeks to assess Harlem’s role in addressing an issue that impacted blacks across New York. King argues that the protest over labor policies in New York emanated from Harlem and that the community became the voice of the city’s African American population. Harlem’s influence can be found in the speeches of community leaders, through the editorials of Harlem-based newspapers such as the Amsterdam News and the New York Age, the efforts of reformers to create labor organizations for black workers, and the responses of the community against discriminatory labor practices in Harlem itself. In 1926, for example, residents of Harlem initiated a boycott against theater owners who refused to hire black projectionists. King sees this effort “as an attempt to mobilize Harlemites and coordinate their activities as a politicized community to challenge discriminatory practices” (p. 91).
Having established the idea of Harlem as “politicized community” with different and varied means of protest (such as newspapers, civic organizations, churches, and neighborhood leaders), the rest of Whose Harlem? discusses how the community reacted to other crises impacting the area. A housing shortage that appeared in the 1920s, for example, threatened Harlem residents with high rents and the abuses of exploitative landlords. African Americans in New York City also had an adversarial relationship with the New York City police, and this organization was well known for the intimidation and violence it used in its dealings with the black community. In response, Harlem residents again used (in King’s words) “the variety of civic, religious, and cultural associations constituting Harlem’s institutional life” (p. 12) to address these concerns. When confronted with high rents, Harlem residents formed civic organizations and used newspaper editorials to advocate for political and judicial protections against corrupt landlords. In the case of police brutality, community protests and a newspaper campaign publicized the issue and helped hold the department more accountable for its actions in Harlem. King suggests that the question of police brutality illustrates how Harlem had created a heightened level of political consciousness for African Americans and how “community mobilization” represented a template for blacks to fight discrimination in New York.
Whose Harlem? provides some valuable conclusions that add new interpretations to the history of that neighborhood. King’s focus on community politics is original and adds another dimension to the history of Harlem during the 1920s. The key idea that emerges in the book is that Harlem, as the most prominent black neighborhood in the nation, established an exemplar of how a community can mobilize to fight injustice and discrimination. The voices of Harlem’s community and church leaders, its newspapers, and its communal organizations illustrate the area’s high level of political engagement and the willingness of its residents to fight discriminatory practices. In so doing, Harlem residents “established the infrastructure for black politics in the 1930s and beyond” (p. 188). King also illustrates how the protest methods used in the Civil Rights Movement had their origins in Harlem’s community politics of the 1920s. Finally, much of the scholarship on Harlem in the 1920s focuses on famous individuals, be they musicians, writers, artists, or intellectuals. King demonstrates that everyday people were critical to Harlem’s history. A few questions, however, are left unanswered in the book. For example, the narrative lacks a true literature review or a comprehensive introduction, and it would be interesting to know if what was occurring in Harlem was also happening in other cities. More importantly, if Harlem was a bellwether for neighborhood activism, then an important part of the story (and one not addressed here) is the extent to which Harlem influenced other African American neighborhoods. Did other cities follow Harlem’s example? Was Harlem seen as a national model to be followed? King’s conclusion only runs a few pages, and the implications of the important research findings raised in the discussion are not considered with much depth. Whose Harlem? nevertheless provides a valuable and fresh perspective on the history of the neighborhood.
Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America has little in common with the volumes by McGruder and King. The latter complement one another chronologically (covering the period from 1890 to 1920) and thematically (both addressing how African Americans in Harlem acquired political and economic agency). Bengali Harlem, however, is not really about Harlem at all. Consequently, the book’s argument is difficult to connect to those found in Race and Real Estate and Whose Harlem? Bald tells the story of the South Asian immigrant experience. He notes that this group is often excluded from typical histories of immigration and that the lives of these people “have been lost to history” (p. 6). South Asian immigrants faced harsh discriminatory practices that restricted their entry into the United States and limited their ability to acquire citizenship. They also did not fit easily into the racial hierarchies that were so important in the United States duringthe early part of the twentieth century (were they “white” or “colored”?). As a result, South Asian immigrants existed in Bald’s words “as a nation beneath the nation in working-class neighborhoods of color from New York to Baltimore to Detroit” (p. 7). Bengali Harlem has two goals. First, Bald tells the story of South Asian immigrants and how they built a life in the United States. Second, he provides a new kind of history that challenges standard interpretations and theories about immigration to the United States. South Asian immigrants did not form ethnic enclaves as other immigrant groups did. Rather, Bald shows how South Asian immigrants integrated into neighborhoods “of color” where they “were able to forge complex and syncretic new lives and build multi-ethnic families and communities” (p. 9).
Bengali Harlem is actually two books in one, with each telling a different story of South Asian immigration to the United States. The first book has little to do with Harlem and focuses mainly on New Orleans, as it was here that the first phase of South Asian immigration took place. The first South Asians arrived in the United States as migratory peddlers who entered the United States in disparate places and then scattered to sell goods (often in New Orleans or Atlantic City) from the “Orient” at a time when such products were much in demand. These peddlers were highly transient and traveled not only throughout the United States but often left the country for extended periods only to return again at a later time. According to Bald, this pattern of immigration “requires us to reimagine the structure of the early-twentieth century migrant experience to recognize the kinds of transnational lives, connections and dynamics we only associate with the present day” (p. 48). Many of these peddlers, however, ultimately settled in the city of New Orleans, where they often lived among and intermarried with African American women living there. Bald notes that “the lives of Bengali Muslim peddlers and their descendants became embedded within black communities and entwined with their histories” (p. 88). This reality, in turn, defines a new sort of immigrant experience (characterized by what Bald calls “cross racial and interethnic dynamics”) that is at variance with the typical pattern of recent immigrants’ lives in the United States.
Harlem appears in the second part of the book, which recounts another pattern of South Asian immigration to the United States. South Asians were subjects of the British empire and thus had access to employment on British merchant ships. The labor of these men was, moreover, in considerable demand in that it was a way to avoid the higher wages commanded by white British seaman. Although South Asians found work on these ships, life aboard was akin to a “floating sweatshop” of demanding and dangerous tasks. Faced with such conditions, many South Asians jumped ship and escaped into American port cities and created new lives for themselves in the United States. This was the process through which South Asians arrived in New York, as its extensive port facilities offered ample opportunities to escape into the city. South Asian sailors found a network of fellow countrymen who then eased their transition to life in New York. This process enabled South Asian Muslims to settle in Harlem. Here, Bald provides a different image of Harlem (indeed, one quite different from the previous two books discussed here) defining the community as “a destination for immigrants from the black diasporic world” (p. 162). South Asians settling in the area in turn became part of a “heterogeneous Muslim community that included African Americans and immigrants from Africa and the Middle East” (p. 164). As occurred in New Orleans, Bald describes how these immigrants intermarried among other groups living there (particularly Puerto Ricans) and created a unique community defined “not by creating a closed enclave of their own but rather by living in an expanding set of concentric circles of identification and association” (p. 188).
Bengali Harlem is elegantly written and presents a sophisticated and thoughtful conclusion. As the author notes, the story of South Asian immigrants “complicate a number of widely accepted notions of U.S. immigration” (p. 220). South Asians in New York did not form their own rigidly defined urban space defined by restaurants, stores, churches, and other symbols of ethnic identity. Instead, they settled in Harlem and integrated among the community there, in turn creating a new multiracial image of the neighborhood. For Bald, Harlem is defined not as an African American neighborhood, but rather as a “dense, heterogeneous space . . . that allowed for different forms of immigrant assimilation and integration” (p. 227). Bald’s perspective on immigration is compelling and his argument is presented carefully and thoughtfully. The definition of Harlem in the title is a misnomer, however, and he is really talking about East Harlem, a distinct neighborhood with an identity and character quite different from Harlem itself. A map in the book also suggests that most of the South Asian immigrants resided in an area around East 98th Street and Second and Third Avenues. At a time when East 96th Street was less of a dividing line than it is today, this area could also comfortably be called Yorkville. Bald’s exclusive focus on South Asians’ interactions with Harlem is also odd given that the immigrants in this area lived to the north of a large German community, to the east of an Irish one, and west of what was then the largest concentration of Italians in the country. These groups are never mentioned in the narrative. Bald presents Harlem as an interracial, integrated community, while every other part of New York appears as closed, rigid, and unwelcoming. This may be true, but no data or conclusions are present to substantiate this point. Bald’s frequent use of the term “of color” is also problematic in that this is a modern sensibility (usually implying African American or Hispanic) that does not really apply to the multiethnic New York of the early twentieth century. The idea that South Asians defined a new form of immigration history is compelling, but a bit more research is needed to apply this definition to the neighborhood life and urban geography of New York City at the time.
These three volumes offer new and compelling interpretations about Harlem and its history. Race and Real Estate and Whose Harlem? complement each other well and show how African Americans used economic and political power to shape Harlem’s character and identity and to acquire autonomy and self-respect in a city characterized by discriminatory and racist practices. Bengali Harlem is not really about Harlem (“Bengali East Harlem” would have been a more accurate title), but the book nonetheless offers a compelling argument about South Asian migration that provides a new paradigm of immigration history. Bengali Harlem also presents an image of urban neighborhoods that challenges the traditional assumption of urban spaces as distinct, well-defined ethnic enclaves. Taken together, all three volumes show how this famous neighborhood has left an important legacy on American urban history and that there is still much to be learned about Harlem and its impact and influence.