CHAPTER 3

DOMESTIC AND SOCIAL LIFE IN NEW YORK

The Housing Problem-Negro Quarters in New York-Harlem, the Great Negro Capital-Social Activities and Social Stratification-Human Nature As Seen at the Bottom and at the Top

BECA

ECAUSE of their natural gregarious tendencies and the difficulty of renting or buying homes among the whites, the Negroes of the Northern cities generally live in segregated districts.

"The color line," says Jacob Riis, "must be drawn through the tenements to give the picture its proper shading. The landlord does the drawing, does it with an absence of pretence, a frankness of despotism, that is nothing if not brutal. The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own soil than the New York landlord in his dealings with colored tenants. Where he permits them to live, they go; where he shuts the door, they stay out. By his grace they exist at all in certain localities; his ukase banishes them from others." 1

The Negro quarters generally comprise the old residences abandoned by the whites, into which the Negroes are packed like sardines. "In most northern cities," says George Haynes, "the housing condition shows a majority of the Negro families coming North are grievously overcrowded and in practically all of the cities the rents for them have been far in excess of those for residents who are residing at the same time in similar localities. A survey made by the Federation of Churches of Buffalo in 1922 disclosed the fact that about 75 percent of the colored families occupied a section of that city which contained the poorest houses, some of which had formerly been condemned as not habitable. A similar survey made by the Federated Churches of Cleveland showed that while a substantial part of the colored people have secured good houses, inadequate and unsanitary conditions still exist in one of the principal Negro communities of the city.

"In Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Housing Association found in a recent survey that only 10.5 percent of the houses occupied by Negró 'How the Other Half Lives, p. 148.

families were equipped for sanitation, convenience and comfort, while 28.6 of the houses occupied by whites were so equipped."

"2

In New York City the earliest Negro quarter consisted of some old barracks on the edge of the town once occupied by soldiers and later used as a poor-house.

In the middle of the last century, when Washington Square and lower Fifth Avenue were the center of aristocratic life, the colored people, whose chief occupation was domestic service in the homes of the rich, lived in scattered nests to the south, east, and west of the square. Negro churches were then located on Church, Leonard, Mott, and Anthony Streets. From the middle of the last century to about 1875 the Negro residences centered on Thompson Street.

From 1875 to about 1890 the Negro quarter consisted of old residences and store buildings on Seventh Avenue and the cross streets from 25th to 42nd, and adjacent to this quarter was the worst red light district in the city, the successor to the celebrated "Five Points" of lower New York. Jacob Riis says of the Negro of this district: "His home surroundings, except when he is utterly depraved, reflect his blithesome temper. The poorest negro housekeeper's room in New York is bright with gaily-colored prints of his beloved 'Abe Linkum,' General Grant, President Garfield, Mrs. Cleveland, and other national celebrities, and cheery with flowers and singing birds. In the art of putting the best foot foremost, of disguising his poverty by making a little go a long way, our negro has no equal. When a fair share of prosperity is his, he knows how to make life and home very pleasant to those about him. Pianos and parlor furniture abound in the uptown homes of colored tenants and give them a very prosperous air. But even where the wolf howls at the door, he makes a bold and gorgeous front. The amount of 'style' displayed on fine Sundays on Sixth and Seventh Avenues by colored holiday-makers would turn a pessimist black with wrath. Poverty, abuse, and injustice alike the negro accepts with imperturbable cheerfulness. His philosophy is of the kind that has no room for repining." "

About 1890 the Negroes began to occupy 53rd Street from Sixth Avenue to Ninth Avenue, which had become undesirable for the whites because of the elevated railway's traversing this narrow street, filling it with intolerable noise and smoke, and darkening the first and second stories of the residences. From this street the Negro quarter "Negro Migration," Opportunity, Oct., 1924, p. 304.

'Op. cit., p. 153.

spread to a dozen or more adjoining blocks, and housed a population of about 50,000.

"The West Fifty-third Street settlement," says the Negro poet, James Weldon Johnson, "deserves some special mention because it ushered in a new phase of life among colored New Yorkers. Three rather well appointed hotels were opened in the street and they quickly became the centers of a sort of fashionable life that hitherto had not existed. On Sunday evenings these hotels served dinner to and attracted crowds of well-dressed diners. One of these hotels, The Marshall, became famous as the headquarters of Negro talent. There gathered the actors, the musicians, the composers, the writers, the singers, dancers and vaudevillians. There one went to get a close-up of Williams and Walker, Cole and Johnson, Ernest Hogan, Will Marion Cook, Jim Europe, Aida Overton, and of others equally and less known. Paul Laurence Dunbar was frequently there whenever he was in New York. Numbers of those who love to shine by the light reflected from celebrities were always to be found. The first modern jazz band ever heard in New York, or, perhaps anywhere, was organized at The Marshall. It was a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making the first dominant use of banjos, saxophones, clarinets and trap drums in combination, and was called 'The Memphis Students.' Jim Europe was a member of that band, and out of it grew the famous Clef Club, of which he was the noted leader, and which for a long time monopolized the business of 'entertaining' private parties and furnishing music for the new dance craze." 4

About 1900, because of the encroachments of business in the Fifty-third Street quarter, the Negroes began to form a settlement in Harlem. "Harlem," says Johnson, “had been overbuilt with large, new-law apartment houses, but rapid transportation to that section was very inadequate the Lenox Avenue Subway had not yet been built and landlords were finding difficulty in keeping houses on the east side of the section filled. Residents along and near Seventh Avenue were fairly well served by the Eighth Avenue Elevated. A colored man, in the real estate business at this time, Philip A. Payton, approached several of these landlords with the proposition that he would fill their empty or partially empty houses with steady colored tenants. The suggestion was accepted, and one or two houses on One Hundred and Thirty-fourth Street east of Lenox Avenue were taken over. Gradually other houses were filled." 5

Johnson, "The Making of Harlem," Survey Graphic, Mar., 1925. "Ibid.

Now the Negro quarter extends from Eighth Avenue to the Harlem river and from 130th Street to 150th Street. It contains a population of nearly 200,000, and is the great Negro capital of the world. "Here in Manhattan," says the Survey Graphic, "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."

Harlem is a miniature Negro world. A stranger walking through Lenox Avenue or Seventh Avenue would see only Negro faces. He would see Negro churches, theaters, schools, banks, undertakers, pawnshops, mercantile establishments, barber shops, beauty parlors, hotels, restaurants, cabarets, pool-rooms, drug stores, news stands, fruit vendors, and even Negro cab drivers, and Negro policemen.

"Harlem," as viewed by Johnson, "is in many respects typically Negro. It has many unique characteristics. It has movement, color, gaiety, singing, dancing, boisterous laughter and loud talk. One of its outstanding features is brass band parades. Hardly a Sunday passes but that there are several of these parades of which many are gorgeous with regalia and insignia. Almost any excuse will do-the death of an humble member of the Elks, the laying of a corner stone, the 'turning out' of the order of this or that."6

A noticeable feature of Harlem is its great number of fakirs. In reference to this, Winthrop D. Lane says: "Black art flourishes in Harlem and elsewhere in New York. Egyptian seers uncover hidden knowledge, Indian fortune-tellers reveal the future, sorcerers perform their mysteries. Feats of witchcraft are done daily. A towel for turban and a smart manner are enough to transform any Harlem colored man into a dispenser of magic to his profit.

"Come with me into any little stationery store on Lenox or Seventh Avenue-the two main business thoroughfares of the districtand peep into the dream and mystery books there offered for sale. Some of these can be bought, as said, for fifteen or twenty cents, others cost a dollar. Here is one called Albertus Magnus. It is described as the 'approved, verified, sympathetic and natural Egyptian secrets, or

"The Making of Harlem," Survey Graphic, Mar., 1925.

White and Black Art for Man and Beast, revealing the Forbidden Knowledge and Mysteries of Ancient Philosophers.' Another is Napoleon's own Oraculum and Book of Fate, containing the explanations of dreams and other mysteries consulted on every occasion by Napoleon himself.""

A singular fact about the Negro population of Harlem is that its foreign-born element seems to take the leadership. The famous Negro poet, Claude McKay, and the great organizer of the movement to reclaim Africa for the blacks, Marcus Garvey, are natives of Jamaica.

"It is safe to say," remarks W. A. Domingo, "that West Indian representation in the skilled trades is relatively large; this is also true of the professions, especially medicine and dentistry. Like the Jew, they are forever launching out in business, and such retail businesses as are in the hands of Negroes in Harlem are largely in the control of the foreign-born. While American Negroes predominate in forms of business like barber shops and pool-rooms in which there is no competition from white men, West Indians turn their efforts almost invariably to fields like grocery stores, tailor shops, jewelry stores and fruit vending in which they meet the fiercest kind of competition. In some of these fields they are the pioneers or the only surviving competitors of white business concerns. In more ambitious business enterprises like real estate and insurance they are relatively numerous. The only Casino and moving picture theater operated by Negroes in Harlem is in the hands of a native of one of the small islands. On Seventh Avenue a West Indian woman conducts a millinery store that would be a credit to Fifth Avenue." &

"There is a diametrical difference between American and West Indian Negroes in their worship. While large sections of the former are inclined to indulge in displays of emotionalism that border on hysteria, the latter, in their Wesleyan Methodist and Baptist churches maintain, in the face of the assumption that people from the tropics are necessarily emotional, all the punctilious emotional restraint characteristic of their English background. In religious radicalism the foreign-born are again pioneers and propagandists. The only modernist church among the thousands of Negroes in New York (and perhaps the country) is led by a West Indian, Rev. E. Ethelred Brown, an ordained Unitarian minister, and is largely supported by his fellow-islanders." "

'Lane, "Ambushed in the City," Survey Graphic, Mar., 1925.

8

"The Tropics in New York," Survey Graphic, Mar., 1925.

'Domingo, "The Tropics in New York," Survey Graphic, Mar., 1925.