Mapping the Mundane: Visual Arguments about Harlem’s Past

Dr. Andrew Fearnley, American Studies

The New York neighbourhood of Harlem remains one of America’s most iconic communities, and subject of a vast scholarship. Yet students on my upper-level module ‘Harlem and the State of Urban America’ continue to make exciting discoveries about this neighbourhood’s past. For several years now, their carefully grounded studies of Harlem’s daily life have been bringing into view previously unknown or under-appreciated figures and events, and surfacing new perspectives on this community. The very best maps constitute examples of what Yale historian Bill Rankin has recently called a ‘visual argument’—each map’s distinct silhouette of pins calls our attention to certain spatial arrangements, as well as to each student’s interpretation of urban space and history.¹

The main source of material on which these student projects rest are the African American newspapers that covered every aspect of Harlem over the past century, and to which the University of Manchester library offers excellent and recently-expanded access. When readers opened the pages of their New York Amsterdam News, they found the lives of famous and ordinary Black folk side-by-side, encountering stories both serious and frivolous, and reminding us of what historian Matthew Delmont has called ‘the joyous complexity of everyday black lives and communities.’²

While recent scholarship on the musician and band leader Duke Ellington has foregrounded the role Harlem played as a signature motif of his compositions, Georgia Chisholm’s research pushes us in a different direction: showing Ellington’s commitment to the physical space and people of Harlem.³ Between the late 1920s and 1940s, Ellington’s band played in a variety of venues, entertaining ‘all over the neighbourhood for all kinds of audiences,’ including at the celebrated Cotton Club and Apollo Theater, as well as the more modest settings of the Harlem YMCA and City College’s Great Hall. The range of venues and audiences, Chisholm argues, suggests Ellington’s ‘extraordinary dedication’ to this community, and is in keeping with his proud descriptions of Harlem as ‘practically our own city.’⁴

The performer Josephine Baker, an African American migrant from St. Louis who danced in Harlem’s nightclubs from 1922 until 1925, but who vaulted to world fame in Paris, is the subject of Eve Watson’s study. Although Baker settled in France and took French citizenship in 1937, she returned periodically to New York, and her life abroad prompted sustained coverage in the US. On several return trips Baker’s wealth and fame permitted her access to some of midtown’s swankiest hotels. Her return in 1951 prompted the creation of “Josephine Baker Day,” and Watson’s map shows—for the first time—the route taken through Central Harlem by her ‘mammoth’ 27-car motorcade. That event symbolizes how even though Baker only briefly lived in this community, Black journalists continued to claim her as a ‘Harlemite,’ a practice that recalls historian Lara Putnam’s observation that US newspapers ‘masked’ the diverse musical styles of Black and Hispanic Caribbean artists by referring to them only as ‘Spanish American.’⁵

Alongside celebrities and performers, Cecily Hood shows that soldiers from the 369th Infantry Regiment, the first comprised of African American soldiers to fight in France, also regularly paraded along the neighbourhood’s thoroughfares. When the Regiment returned to New York in 1919, it was cheered by 500,000 people as it marched up Fifth Avenue to 145th Street. The Homecoming Parade is one of several such events plotted on Hood’s map, which points to Harlemites’ pride in the Regiment in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Another expression of that community interest, though, was a campaign to have all Black officers serve in the 369th, a short-lived but important effort led by a group known as the ‘Equity Congress’, and not previously discussed in scholarship.

Examining Black New York beyond Harlem, and attending to the ethnic diversity of the community, have been more pronounced features of students’ projects in 23-24 and 24-25 than in previous years. Emilia Shaw’s map of the Negro Actors Guild which supported the ‘social and welfare needs’ of Black artists shows how the organization appealed to different groups around Midtown and in Central Harlem, organizing fundraisers at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street and the Mansfield Theater on 47th Street, and drawing distinct audiences of supporters.

The demographic churning of Central Harlem is the frame for Rachel Conway’s map which looks at the movements of the neighbourhood’s sizeable Jewish population in the first decades of the century. Conway tracks the presence of Jewish religious, cultural, and fraternal groups within Harlem, and then, starting in the late 1910s and early 1920s, their move to other Manhattan neighbourhoods, a shift that halved Harlem’s Jewish population from 175,000 to 88,000 in a few years. Studies by historian Jeffrey Gurock have already attended to these movements, but Conway’s map skilfully shows how class shaped that mobility—with more prosperous Jewish groups leaving Harlem and settling on the Upper West Side, while less affluent ones headed for Washington Heights, a community whose Jewish population doubled between 1920 and 1930.

Anya Carr’s important study of ‘Spanish Harlem’ similarly tracks how amid rising emigration from Puerto Rico to New York in the decade after 1945, a network of associations crisscrossed Black and Puerto Rican communities in East and Central Harlem in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Carr’s project highlights the shared bilingual spaces—the churches, schools, and community centres—that became vibrant sites of organizing and political action, and the coverage this theme received in the Amsterdam News. Such institutions included the Frederick Douglass Educational Center, set up in 1952, and the East Harlem Protestant Parish, which mobilized people spiritually as well as practically, organizing drives to clean up the neighbourhood. Carr’s work draws a distinction between the ‘localised, grassroots coalitions’ that existed in East Harlem, and the ‘more global character of Central Harlem’s coalition politics.’

One grassroots issue that shaped much of this neighbourhood’s politics around mid-century was that of housing, a smouldering source of disaffection, and a barometer of Manhattan’s racial and economic stratification. Connor Hendrick’s study examines community activism around the issue in the mid-1930s, plotting the creation of several groups, and their coordination of rent strikes, legal campaigns, and, in October 1937, marches along the neighbourhood’s main avenues. What is particularly notable about this eruption of activism, though, was the fact few were untouched by it, and Hendrick’s map captures how even middle-class residents, of Sugar Hill and St. Nicholas Avenue, participated in this wave of strikes and pickets.

Ava Griffiths’ important map of the New Harlem Tenants League—set up in 1939, and not to be confused with the better-known and earlier Harlem Tenants League—shows how such activism remained a key facet of grassroots politics through the Second World War and beyond. While the NTL, like its precursors, lobbied for protection against private landlords, Griffiths’ map also records how, in the 1940s and 1950s, the actions of public officials were increasingly scrutinized, as municipal services, such as garbage collection, and policies of urban renewal and slum clearance, became no less significant in shaping Harlem’s built landscape at mid-century.

Housing, as Carla Neto’s project reminds us, was not only an issue about cost, quality, and access, but also one more site where Harlemites, and especially Black women, were subjected to harassment and violence. Neto’s project charts twenty incidents between the 1920s and 1940s where Black women were arrested in private dwellings on charges of ‘vagrancy’—an ill-defined category and one that reporters sometimes presented in the no-less euphemistic language of ‘immoral behavior’ or ‘vice.’ Neto’s project builds on Saidiya Hartman’s scholarship around the ways in which urban officials tried to impose order on this emerging neighbourhood, ‘designat[ing] as crime…the forms of life created by young Black women in the city.’ The map charts not only the gendered application of laws Hartman calls ‘status offenses’, but also calls attention to the geography of these arrests, which fell intensively on Harlem’s central avenues.⁶

In spite of the pervasive police presence across interwar Harlem, this was also a community whose residents were subjected to frequent crime. Harlem’s hotels, the subject of Findlay Stronach’s map, were not uncommonly sites of robberies in 1920s and ‘30s. Yet such was the regard in which many of these institutions were held by the community and the press, that to rob a Black-owned hotel in Harlem, as the protagonist in Colson Whitehead’s recent heist novels jokes, was ‘like taking a piss on the Statue of Liberty.’⁷ Puzzlingly little scholarship exists on Harlem’s hotels, yet, as Stronach argues, the operation of these establishments offered modest opportunity for people of colour to break through as business owners. In a community frequently visited by the itinerant, hotels help to explain why Harlem was persistently ‘infused…with the exciting intellectual rhythms of the black diaspora.’⁸

Stronach’s project was one of several that examined Harlem’s businesses, and which drew, like others, on the advertisements found in the Amsterdam News. Rebecca Hearn-Phillips’ study made use of those ads, using such to trace the beauty parlors connected to four major chains, owned by the Black businesswomen, Madame Sarah Washington, L. T. Hunter, C. J. Walker, and Estelle B. Daniels. It confirms the pervasiveness of such institutions and their dense clustering along Seventh Avenue—a thoroughfare the writer Wallace Thurman described in 1927 as ‘teeming with life and ablaze with color.’⁹

Much less has been written about Harlem food and beverage industry in the first half of the twentieth century than its beauty parlors, but Lucy Johnson’s project makes a persuasive case for the need for this to change. The map recovers several of the restaurants and food stands serving Caribbean dishes, as well as those importing foodstuffs from that region. Such businesses included Newton’s Bakery and Lunch, serving Guyanese tennis rolls and Jamaican spice buns; specialist fish markets and purveyors of Barbadian flying fish; the A. J. Bottling company on W 135th Street, brewers of Jamaican ginger beer; and the Caribbean Club—‘home of Calypso’—which opened in 1944. Many of these ventures were owned and run by Caribbean-born Black men and women, and while Johnson’s project enhances our grasp of the economic profile of such figures, it also contributes to our sense of what historian Winston James has called ‘Harlem’s difference,’ its distinctive, diasporic culinary fare.¹⁰

In the way that all these maps ground Harlem’s history in the daily accounts of the Black press, and project the past back onto this built environment, they contribute not only to our understanding of this neighbourhood’s social history, but to the consolidation of a new register for writing the history of Black America—recovering the ‘mundane, [and] not only [the] triumphant and tragic.’ For a community whose past has long been written largely as rhapsody, claimed as exceptional, these students’ engagement with the ordinary, physical, lived, and social setting of this iconic neighbourhood, is itself an intervention.