‘Ain't Misbehavin'’ — HARLEM: A HISTORY

For centuries after European settlement, the area in upper Manhattan - named Haarlem by the original Dutch settlers after the city of Haarlem in Holland - was a place of farms and villages. It was much too far from the city's core at the tip of the island. Once transportation improved, it became a prime location for the country estates of wealthy New Yorkers, who usually traveled by boat up the East River, although horse-and-buggy roads were also established.

Then, between 1878 and 1881, Manhattan's three elevated railroad lines were extended farther north, making Harlem much more accessible for daily commuters. At the same time, a huge influx of European immigrants began to settle into downtown ethnic enclaves, causing older white residents to flee. Land and real estate speculators foresaw that Harlem could be the residential place of choice for those more established white New Yorkers. After the City of New York leveled the hills and filled in the swamps to create building lots, land speculators bought them up and then erected apartment buildings on them or sold them at a profit to other builders. In the frenzy of buying, selling, and building, few realized that building prices and apartment rental rates were being highly inflated. The bottom dropped out of the Harlem real estate market in 1904-1905. Building owners could not charge high enough prices or rents to pay their bank mortgages. Harlem, with its broad, tree-lined avenues, beautiful townhouses, and exclusive apartment buildings, was at risk of becoming a palatial ghost town.

In the meantime, the black population of New York had grown by leaps and bounds. Between 1890 and 1910, the number of Negro New Yorkers nearly tripled. Like the new immigrants from Europe, they crowded into the scattered sections that contained "their kind" in places nicknamed The Tenderloin, Hell's Kitchen, and San Juan Hill on the West Side.

So overcrowded did these sections become that the "black population dam" threatened to burst. Many Harlem real estate owners were desperate to rent [their apartments], and so Harlem began to open up to blacks.

As middle-class blacks began to move to Harlem, so did their institutions. In 1911, St. Philip's Protestant Episcopal Church, the wealthiest black church in Manhattan, bought property in Harlem on which to build a new sanctuary. In less than a decade, all the major black churches in Manhattan had relocated to Harlem. So had the Negro YMCA, the lodges, the fraternities, and the social clubs.

Between 1915 and 1918, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans headed northward. Segregation in the South helped spur that migration. The former slave states that had lost the Civil War blamed the former slaves for the war, as well as for the loss of the southern way of life that had existed during slavery. Once the occupying Union troops had left, southerners had forced the former slaves back into a life that was not much different from slavery. Laws had been passed that restricted the rights of African-Americans so they could not enjoy full citizenship. Most of these laws had been aimed at keeping Negroes working the plantations as poor sharecroppers.

Midwestern cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit experienced the greatest influx of southern blacks. But tens of thousands also made their way to Harlem.

Because it was a major Atlantic port, New York had a more varied black population than other cities. There was a large influx of West Indian blacks at this time, and there were immigrants from Africa. Tensions existed between the foreign- and native- born blacks, and between the northern- and southern-born ones. But here was also a growing sense of the power of numbers and a sense of common frustration in the face of the seemingly overwhelming hatred by European Americans.

It was this sense of frustration that Marcus Garvey tapped when he arrived in Harlem to advance his ideas of black nationalism. A West Indian by birth, Garvey came to Harlem in 1916 and the following year founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He urged blacks to be proud of their color and to build social and economic institutions of their own.

When World War I broke out, W.E.B. DuBois, writer, intellectual, and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who viewed military service as a way for African-Americans to assert their full right to citizenship, urged blacks to enlist in the armed services. Blacks did enlist in large numbers. One regiment raised in Harlem, the 369th Infantry, was the nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters. The black units distinguished themselves in the war in Europe not only on the battlefield but in the military bands. The bands took the exciting sounds of ragtime and jazz to England, France, and elsewhere and caused a sensation.

The positive effects of World War I and the Great Migration included not only a greater sense of unity but also a burst of creativity. In the northern urban centers, blacks born and raised in the North heard southern dialects and observed southern folkways. Some looked down upon black southern culture, but others were intrigued by it and determined to write about it.

Black artists observed the way these new arrivals moved and dressed and wanted to capture those rhythms and colors on canvas. The black writer, educator, and intellectual Alain Leroy Locke asserted that the coming together of all these people in Harlem created a new sense of identity among them: "Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another."

Locke, born in Philadelphia in 1886, attended Harvard University and was the first African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in England. He served for many years as chairman of the philosophy department of Howard University, a black university in Washington, D.C. Like other important black intellectual leaders, he experienced the pull between the two opposing ideas of separatism and integration - especially in the areas of literature and art. On the one hand, there was the need to establish a specifically black voice or aesthetic or viewpoint. On the other, there was the feeling that black equality would be advanced if black writers and artists could show through their work that there was the feeling that there was really little difference between the races. In no place was that pull expressed more publicly than in Harlem. (Jim Haskins from 'The Harlem Renaissance')

RENT PARTIES:

Fats Waller got his start in Harlem playing "rent parties." Rent parties were common in Harlem as a way to help pay the rent when funds were low: "These musical gatherings were known as parties, rent shouts, rent socials, parlor socials, or Saturday night functions. It didn't matter what you called them, they meant the same thing: someone was low on funds and had decided to throw a party to help make ends meet. Rent parties weren't limited to Harlem. In fact, in every black ghetto where rent money was hard to come by Saturday night functions would occur.

The admission at the door would pay for the musicians, and would vary according to their popularity. The apartment owner would make his rent by selling the drink and food. This was during the height of Prohibition and the hooch was usually rotgut whiskey or bathtub gin. But it wasn't the food or liquor that attracted crowds to a social, it was the music and the fierce competition that existed between the pianists. This was exuberant music, shouts, and stride. People came to have a good time and they didn't want to hear the blues. The men who played this music were garish extroverts who led the revolution in black music. It wasn't unusual for one of these parties to last all through the night and once the competition got going, two pianists would battle for hours on end. Each would try to outdo each other with dazzling rhythms, new harmonies, or new tunes. Constant improvisation and variation were demanded, leading to many changes and the maturation of jazz piano style." (Maurice Waller from "Fats Waller")