LEROI
JONES
(Amiri
Baraka)
Born in 1934 in Newark, New
Jersey, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka),
is a talented poet and playwright, essayist, and unique Black militant. His
position in America
has always been paradoxical and he has been called a "poet of politics",
accused often of being a black racist, both in his plays as well as in his
poetry. Jones is also highly regarded as a prose stylist. Of himself, Jones has
observed concerning his ambitions: "To write beautiful poems full of mystical
sociology and abstract politics. To show America it is ugly and full of
middle-class toads (black and white)".
City of Harlem
In a very real
sense, Harlem is the capital of Black America.
And America
has always been divided into black and white, and the substance of the division
is social, economic, and cultural. But even the name Harlem,
now, means simply Negroes (even though some other peoples live there too). The
identification is international as well: even in Belize,
the capital of predominantly Negro British Honduras, there are vendors who
decorate their carts with flowers and the names or pictures of Negro culture
heroes associated with Harlem like Sugar Ray
Robinson. Some of the vendo 21521q1621v rs even wear T-shirts that say "Harlem, U.S.A.,"
and they speak about it as a black Paris.
In Havana a
young Afro-Cuban begged me to tell him about the "big leg ladies of Lenox Avenue,
hoping, too, that I could provide some way for him to get to that mystic and
romantic place.
There are, I
suppose, contained within the central mythology of Harlem,
almost as many versions of its glamour, and its despair, as there are places
with people to make them up. (In one meaning of the name, Harlem
is simply a place white cab drivers will not go.) And Harlem
means not only Negroes, but, of course, whatever other associations one might
connect with them. So in one breath Harlem
will be the pleasure-happy centre of the universe, full of loud, hippy mamas in
electric colours and their fast, slick-head papas, all of them twisting and
grinning in the streets in a kind of existential joyousness that never permits
of sadness or responsibility. But in another breath this same place will be the
gathering place for every crippling human vice, and
the black men there simply victims of their own peculiar kind of sloth and
childishness. But perhaps these are not such different versions after all;
chances are both these stereotypes come from the same kinds of minds.
But Harlem, as it is, as it exists for its people, as an
actual place where actual humans live - that is a very different thing. Though,
to be sure, Harlem is a place - a city
really - where almost anything any person could think of to say goes on,
probably does go on, or has gone on, but like any other city, it must escape
any blank generalisation simply because it is alive, and changing each second
with each breath any of its citizens take.
When Africans
first got to New York, or New
Amsterdam as the Dutch called it, they lived in the farthest
downtown portions of the city, near what is now called the Bowery. Later, they
shifted, and were shifted, as their numbers grew, to the section known as Greenwich Village. The Civil War Draft Riots in 1863
accounted for the next move by New
York's growing Negro population.
After this
violence (a few million dollars' worth of property was destroyed, and a Negro
orphanage was burned to the ground) a great many Negroes moved across the river
into Brooklyn. But many others moved farther
uptown to an area just above what was known as Hell's Kitchen. The new Negro
ghetto was known as Black Bohemia, and later, after the success of an all black
regiment in the Spanish-American war, this section was called San
Juan Hill. And even in the twenties when most Negroes had made
their move even further uptown to Harlem, San Juan Hill
was still a teeming branch office of black night life.
Three sections
along the east side of Manhattan, The Tenderloin, Black Bohemia, and San Juan
Hill or The Jungle featured all kinds of "sporting houses", cabarets, "dancing
classes", afterhours gin mills, as well as the Gumbo Suppers, Fish Fries, Egg
Nog Parties, Chitterlin' Struts, and Pigfoot Hops, before the Negroes moved
still farther uptown.
The actual move
into what is now Harlem was caused by quite a
few factors, but there are a few that were particularly important as catalysts.
First, locally, there were more race riots around the turn of the century
between the white poor (as always) and the Negroes. Also, the Black Bohemia
section was by now extremely overcrowded, swelled as it was by the influx of
Negroes from all over the city. The section was a notorious red light district
(but then there have only been two occupations a black woman could go into in America
without too much trouble: the other was domestic help) and the overcrowding
made worse by the moral squalor that poverty encourages meant that the growing
local black population had to go somewhere. The immigrant groups living on both
sides of the black ghetto fought in the streets to keep their own ghettos
autonomous and pure, and the Negro had to go elsewhere.
At this time,
just about the turn of the century, Harlem (an area which the first Africans
had helped connect with the rest of the Dutch city by clearing a narrow road -
Broadway - up into the woods of New Harlem) was still a kind of semi-suburban
area, populated, for the most part, by many of the city's wealthiest families.
The elaborate estates of the eighteenth century, built by men like Alexander
Hamilton and Roger Morris, were still being lived in, but by the descendants of
wealthy merchants. (The Hamilton house still
stands near Morningside
Heights, as an historic
landmark called The Grange. The Morris house, which was once lived in by Aaron
Burr, is known as The Jumel House, and it still stands at the northern part of Harlem, near the Polo
Grounds, as a
museum run by the D.A.R. George Washington used it as his headquarters for a
while during the Revolutionary War.) So there was still the quiet elegance of
the nineteenth century brownstones and spacious apartment buildings, the wide
drives, rolling greens, and huge-trunked trees.
What made the
area open up to Negroes was the progress that America has always been proud of
-- an elevated railway went up in the nineties, and the very rich left
immediately and the near rich very soon after. Saint Philips Church, after
having its old site bought up by a railroad company, bought a large piece of
property, with large apartment buildings, in the centre of Harlem,
and, baby, the panic was on. Rich and famous Negroes moved into the vacated
luxury houses very soon after, including the area now known as "Strivers Row",
which was made up of almost one hundred brick mansions designed by Stanford
White. The panic was definitely on -- but still only locally.
What really
turned that quiet suburb into "Black Paris", was the
coming of the First World War and the mass exodus of Negroes from the South to
large urban centres. At the turn of the century most Negroes still lived in the
South and were agricultural labourers, but the entrance of America into the War, and the
desperate call for cheap unskilled labour, served to start thousands of Negroes
scrambling North. The flow of immigrants from Europe had all but ceased by 1914, and the industrialists
knew immediately where to turn. They even sent recruiters down into the South
to entice the Negroes North. In 1900 the Negro population of New York City was 60,000; by 1920 it was
152,467; by 1930 it was 227,706. And most of these moved, of course, uptown.
It was this mass
exodus during the early part of the century that was responsible for most of
the black cities of the North - the huge Negro sections of New
York, Chicago, Philadelphia,
Detroit, etc.
It was also responsible for what these sections would very shortly become, as
the masses of Southern Negroes piled into their new Jordans,
thinking to have a go at an innocent America.
The twenties are
legend because they mark America's
sudden insane entrance into the 20th century. The war had brought
about a certain internationalism and prosperity (even, relatively speaking, for
Negroes). During the twenties Harlem was the
mecca of the good time and in many ways even came to symbolise the era called
the Jazz Age.
Delirious white
people made the trip uptown to hear Negro musicians and singers, and watch
Negro dancers, and even Negro intellectuals. It was, I suppose, the black man's
debut into the most sophisticated part of America. The old darkies of the
plantation were suddenly all over the North, and making a whole lot of noise.
There were
nightclubs in Harlem that catered only to
white audiences, but with the best Negro entertainers. White intellectuals made
frequent trips to Harlem, not only to find out about a newly emerging black America,
but to party with an international set of swinging bodies. It was the era of
Ellington at The Cotton Club for the sensual, and The New Negro' for the
intellectual. Everyone spoke optimistically of the Negro Renaissance, and The
New Negro, as if, somehow, the old Negro wasn't good enough.
Harlem sparkled then,
at least externally, and it took the depression to dull that sparkle, and the
long lines of unemployed Negroes and the longer lines at the soup kitchens and
bread queues brought reality down hard on old and new Negroes alike. So the
tourist trade diminished, and colourful Harlem
became just a social liability for the white man, and
an open air jail for the black.
The cold
depression thirties, coupled with the decay of old buildings and ancient
neighbourhoods, and, of course, the seeming inability of the "free enterprise"
system to provide either jobs or hope for a great many black people in the city
of Harlem, have served to make this city another kind of symbol. For many
Negroes, whether they live in Harlem or not,
the city is simply a symbol of naked oppression. You can walk along 125th Street
any evening and meet about one hundred uniformed policemen, who are there, someone will tell you, to protect the people from
themselves.
For many Negroes,
Harlem is a place one escapes from, and lives
in shame about for the rest of his life. But this is one of the weirdest things
about the American experience, that it can oppress a
man, almost suck his life away, and then make him so ashamed that he was among
the oppressed, rather than the oppressors, that he will never offer any
protest.
The New Negro: a
collection of essays published in 1925 by Alain Locke, which attempted to
define the culture of the American Negro.
The legitimate
cultural tradition of the Negro in Harlem (and America) is one of wild happiness,
usually at some black man's own invention - of speech, of dress, of gait, the
sudden twist of a musical phrase, the warmness or hurt of someone's voice.
But that culture
is also one of hatred and despair. Harlem must
contain all of this and be capable of producing all of these emotions.
People line the
streets in summer - on the corners or hanging out the windows - or head for
other streets in winter. Vendors go by slowly and crowds of people from movies
or church. (Saturday afternoons, warm or cold, 125th is jammed with
shoppers and walkers, and the record stores scream through loudspeakers at the
street.)
Young girls,
doctors, pimps, detectives, preachers, drummers, accountants, gamblers, labour
organisers, postmen, wives, Muslims, junkies, the employed, and the unemployed:
all going someplace - an endless stream of Americans, whose singularity in America is that they are black and can never
honestly enter into the lunatic asylum of white America.
Harlem
for this reason is a community of nonconformists, since any black American,
simply by virtue of his blackness, is weird, a nonconformist in this society. A
community of nonconformists, not an artists' colony - though blind "ministers"
still wander sometimes along 137th Street, whispering along the
strings of their guitars - but a colony of old-line Americans, who can hold
out, even if it is a great deal of the time in misery and ignorance, but still
hold out, against the hypocrisy and sterility of big-time America, and still
try to make their own lives, simply because of their colour, but by now, not so
simply, because that colour now does serve to identify people in America whose
feelings about it are not broadcast every day on television.
Questions for
Discussion
According to the author, what is the mythology of Harlem? What is its "reality"?
Describe how Harlem
came into being, historically.
What caused the area known as Harlem
to open up to settlement by Negroes?
What effect did World War I have upon Harlem? the twenties?
According to the author, what is the Negro's
"legitimate cultural tradition?"
Why is Harlem a
"community of nonconformists?"
Exploring Ideas
The author calls New York City "a symbol of naked oppression".
What does he mean by such an observation? How would you define oppression? What
kinds of oppression are there?
How would you describe the "legitimate cultural
tradition" of your people or nation? How important is it for people to have a
cultural tradition?
What, to you, is a nonconformist?
