Harlem Renaissance: When New York Was The Capital Of Black America
A look inside the movement that launched jazz, the NAACP, and swing dancing.
Harlem became home to a large African-American population in a confluence of events: In the early 1900s, black churches began to move farther up town, bringing their congregations with them. A housing crash around the same time led real estate companies to bring in African-American families searching for cheaper housing and at the same time, over 400,000 black people migrated from the violently racist Jim Crow South to the more welcoming North.
In 1917, W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP organized the Silent Parade, in which more than 10,000 African-Americans protested lynching, and anti-black violence. The protest was meant to encourage then-President Woodrow Wilson to enact anti-lynching laws, which he failed to do. The parade was one of the first instances of all black demonstrations for civil rights.
A flag announcing the lynching of an African-American man hangs out of the window of the NAACP headquarters at 69 Fifth Avenue. The practice of announcing lynchings began in 1920, but under threat of losing their lease, the NAACP was forced to stop in 1938.
Jamaican-born civil rights activist Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association were instrumental in creating the atmosphere in which the arts could thrive in Harlem. Garvey established the Negro World, one of the first newspapers to cover African-American arts and politics. The paper promoted emerging black writers and fostered a worldwide interest in the cultural movement taking place in Harlem. Marcus Garvey in 1924.
In 1920, UNIA organized a month of conferences, marches, and parades during what Garvey called the First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. During the first convention, the UNIA adopted the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, one of the first human rights declarations.
Even after Garvey was deported from the United States in 1927, UNIA continued to hold demonstrations like this one in 1930.
Though Harlem jazz hot spot The Cotton Club only admitted white patrons, its stage regularly featured the best African-American jazz musicians and singers of the time. The club showcased orchestras led by greats like Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. In light of this double standard, the poet Langston Hughes criticized The Cotton Club's racist policies, calling it "a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites." In 1935, the club closed after race riots broke out in Harlem, briefly moving to midtown, then closing for good in 1940. Cab Calloway in 1947.
On March 19, 1935, a race riot broke out in Harlem. After a young Puerto Rican boy was stopped for stealing from a predominately white department store, police were called but the store owners decided not to press charges. Police led him away through the back exit of the store but when he disappeared with a cop, the gathered crowd assumed he would beat the boy. The rumors spread until people believed he had been killed by police, although no harm had come to him.
Dunbar Bank, funded by the powerful Rockefeller family, served Harlem as the only bank in the area that employed African-Americans. Though it closed in the 1930s, the bank was the first of it's kind, established specifically for Harlem's black residents.
