Streets, sounds and identity in interwar harlem

Journal of Social History

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 859-894

  Corbould, Clare ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34447498892     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2007.0091     Document Type: Review

References (76)

1. Beverly Smith, "60,000 Negroes Hail King Saul As Parade Hero," New York Herald Tribune (24 Aug. 1927), L. S. Alexander Gumby Collection of Negroiana, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, vol. 40. See also "Harlem Bright and Gay As Elks Assemble for 28th Annual Convention," Negro World (27 Aug. 1927): 2.
2. "30,000 Negro Elks Parade in the Rain: Harlem Throngs Cheer as Gaily Dressed Marchers Charleston to Tunes of 25 Bands," New York Times (24 Aug. 1927): 9.
3. Lemuel F. Parton, " Obi' Men Busy In Harlem Now," New York Sun (24 Aug. 1927), Gumby Collection, vol. 40.
4. "Whole City Radiant on Glorious Easter," New York Times (17 Apr. 1922): 3.
5. "Street Music Is Changing, But Lives On in the City," New York Times (7 Nov. 1926): X6.
6. John R. Chamberlain, "When Spring Comes To Harlem: Claude McKay's Novel Gives a Glowing Picture of the Negro Quarter," The New York Times Book Review (11 March 1928), Gumby Collection, vol. 128. For references to Harlem as "Little Africa," see "Along Rainbow Row: Heart of Little Africa a Lively Place on a Summer Night," New York Times (15 Aug. 1921): E18; "Negro Swarms See Remains of Body," New York Times (2 Sept. 1922): 20; "In the Negro Cabarets: Nightly Attractions in Harlem's 'Little Africa,'" New York Times (5 Sept. 1922): 36; "Colored Citizens Prosperous Here," New York Times (11 Aug. 1929): N5; "'Champion Daredevil' Parachutes to Tenement," The Daily Star (5 July, 1924); "Strange Crimes of Little Africa," New York Times (Aug. 17 1926); "When Rural Negro Reaches Crucible," New York Times (17 April 1927), last three rpt. in Harlem on my Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968, ed. Allon Schoener (1968; New York, 1995), 60-61, 67-68, 70-71. Reference to Harlem as "negro colony" in "Garvey Denounced at Negro Meeting," New York Times (7 Aug. 1922): 7.
7. J. A. Rogers, "Jazz at Home," in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York, 1992), 218.
8. Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 2-3.
9. Leigh Eric Schmidt has given an excellent account of the tendency in twentieth-century history to divide the world into visual and aural, modern and premodern, Western/rational and non-Western/primitive/irrational. See Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2000), 7, 20-22.
10. Steven Connor, "The Modem Auditory I," in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London, 1997), 203-223.
11. Note, for instance, in the photograph below of the crowd on the street outside the theater in which Macbeth was playing, the face of the capped white policeman. For an account of relations between policemen and residents see Marcy S. Sacks, "'To Show Who Was In Charge': Police Repression of New York City's Black Population at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Journal of Urban History 31, no. 6 (Sept. 2005): 799-819.
12. The possession claimed by black Harlem residents differed from that of some other minority groups in the city, namely white middle-class women and gay men, who justified their presence on the streets through consumption, specifically, in wandering the streets looking at shop windows. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York, 1994), 189-90; Chauncey cites Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana, 1986), 18.
13. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, 2003). Also see Hortense J. Spillers, "Moving On Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon," in Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago, 2003), 251-276; and Shane White and Graham White, Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston, 2005). For more general accounts of the role played by sound-rather than music - in American life see Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, 1993); R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977; Rochester, Vt., 1993); Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2001); Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens, 2004); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, 2003).
14. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; London, 1986), 9.
15. The phrase was the subheading of a special edition of the Survey Graphic in March 1925, published in altered form as Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (1925; New York, 1992).
16. See Leroi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963), but also see Ralph Ellison, "Blues People," New York Review (6 Feb. 1964), rpt. in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York, 2003), 278-287. On counterpublic spheres, see Nancy Fraser, "Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas," in Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the 'Postsocialist' Condition (New York, 1997), 99-120; Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 109-142; Robert Asen, "Seeking the 'Counter' in Counterpublics," Communication Theory 10, no. 4 (Nov. 2000): 424-446. On a "black public sphere" see The Black Public Sphere Collective, ed., The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (Chicago, 1995); Catherine R. Squires, "Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres," Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (Nov. 2002): 446-468; Joanna Brooks, "The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic," William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (Jan. 2005): 67-92.
17. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1992).
18. Richard Bruce Nugent, "The Dark Tower," Opportunity 5, no. 10 (Oct. 1927): 305-6, rpt. in Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections From the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, ed. Thomas H. Wirth (Durham, N.C., 2002), 159-160.
19. Eric Lott, "Nation Time," American Literary History 7, no. 3 (Autumn, 1995): 565-566.
20. Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (1965; New York, 1999).
21. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 32.
22. See Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (New York, 1993), 235.
23. "Jam Streets as 'Macbeth' Opens," New York Times (15 Apr. 1936), rpt. in Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968, ed. Allon Schoener (1968; New York, 1995), 142-143.
24. "Harlem Hilarious Over Louis: 200,000 Negroes Celebrate Victory of Bomber in Wild Night of Joy," newspaper clipping, Gumby Collection, vol. 41.
25. The study of public space, as Robin Kelley has argued, is crucial to a history of black working-class resistance, since so much of that activity was "unorganized, clandestine, and evasive." As he has argued, this research destabilizes accounts of the civil rights movement that are overly focused on desegregation and the 1950s. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 56.
26. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York, 1998), xi. "Hariem Hilarious...". There was a similar response to another of Louis's wins in 1937, see "100,000 Celebrate Louis Victory Over Braddock," New York Times (22 Jun. 1937), rpt. in Schoener, ed., Harlem On My Mind, 144-145.
27. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969; London, 1995), 129-132.
28. Richard Wright, "High Tide in Harlem: Joe Louis as a Symbol of Freedom," New Masses (5 Jul. 1938), rpt. in Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and its Cultural Content From Polemics to Pulpit, ed. Gerald Early (Hopewell, N.J., 1992), 156.
29. Gerald Early, "The Hero of the Blues," in Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', and Slam Dunking, ed. Gena Dagel Caponi (Amherst, 1999), 384.
30. A 1935 photograph of Joe and Marva Trotter Louis wife captured Louis staring hard at the camera. His wife, by contrast, did not look at the camera, and was smiling, laughing even. See Harlem On My Mind, ed. Schoener, 164.
31. "Harlem Hilarious ..."
32. In 1925 the Amsterdam News called on black youth to "'deport [themselves] with greater decorum and decency on street cars' and stop behaving 'like so many jungle apes.'" Cited in Shane White and Graham White, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, 1998), 230-232.
33. This was true too during antebellum slavery. See Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, 88-91; and White and White, The Sounds of Slavery, 181-182.
34. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York, 1930), 236-237.
35. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995), 327-8. In silent film, "[t]he eloquence missing in the spoken word is ... given to the body." Jane Gaines, "Within Our Gates: From Race Melodrama to Opportunity Narrative," in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era (Bloomington, IN, 2001), 76.
36. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 235-236.
37. Major Arthur Little, cited by David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1979; New York, 1997), 5. Also see A'Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (New York, 2001), 266-267.
38. Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (New York, 1995), 6.
39. "'Champion Daredevil' Parachutes to Tenement," 60.
40. Ibid., 60-61.
41. "All New York Thrilled When Negro Aviator Descends in Parachute," Negro World (12 May 1923): 2.
42. Bundles, On Her Own Ground, 129-30.
43. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 (New York, 2000), 221. Also see Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 202-203; Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 1902-1941 : I, Too, Sing America (New York, 1986), 162; Daylanne K. English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill, 2004), 55.
44. "Flo Owes Us Something," The Inter-State Tattler (14 Oct. 1927), rpt. in Harlem on My Mind, ed. Schoener, 72.
45. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 200.
46. Ibid., 30; "Florence Mills, Famed Artiste, Paid Remarkable Last Tribute As World Mourns Her Passing," Negro World (12 Nov. 1927): 3.
47. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 201. This description was repeated by Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940; New York, 1986), 274.
48. "Florence Mills, Famed Artiste."
49. Ibid.
50. "Barron D. Wilkins Slain," New York Times (25 May 1924), rpt. in Harlem On My Mind, ed. Schoener, 59.
51. Hughes, The Big Sea, 245.
52. Smith, "60,000 Negroes Hail King Saul As Parade Hero"; "30,000 Negro Elks Parade in the Rain"; Nugent, "The Dark Tower," 159; Edward Dillon, "Harlem Drive Upon Italians Stirs Disorder," (4 Oct. 1935), newspaper clipping, Gumby Collection, vol. 40; Johnson, Black Manhattan, 201; "'Champion Daredevil' Parachutes to Tenement," The Daily Star (5 July, 1924); "150,000 Honor Garvey," Negro World (21 Aug. 1926); last two rpt. in Harlem On My Mind, ed. Schoener, 60-61, 69.
53. George S. Schuyler, "The Soap Box," New York Amsterdam News (22 Aug. 1927): 4.
54. Nancy Cunard, "Harlem Reviewed," Negro: Anthology Made by Nancy Cunard 1931-1933 (London, 1934), 74.
55. Randolph was arrested for speaking without a permit, see Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930 (Bloomington, IN, 1996), 107-108; "'Race-Uplift' Groups Stage Early Morning Battle At 133rd Street and Lenox Ave," New York Age (10 Sept. 1932).
56. District Attorney's Closed Case File 129713 (1920) (Municipal Archives, New York City). Thanks to Stephen Robertson for sharing this story, and those in the following footnote, with me.
57. "Lenox Avenue Crowd Makes Difficulty For Patrolmen Attempting To Make Arrest," New York Age (28 July 1928): 1. Also see "Papers Distort Simple Arrest And Make It Appear Race Riot," New York Age (12 Aug. 1922): 1; "Two Officers From Headquarters Face Charge of Brutality," New York Age (14 Apr. 1923): 1; "Police Brutality Against Women Prisoners Of 14th Precinct Stirs Neighbors," New York Age (13 Sept. 1924): 1; "134th Street Tenants Stone Policeman Who Arrests Holdup Men," New York Age (12 Jun. 1926): 1; "Angry Crowd Threaten Officer," New York Amsterdam News (25 Aug. 1926): 3; "Wild Excitement Prevails as Intoxicated Cop Shoots at Lad," New York Amsterdam News (30 March 1927): 1; "Police Brutality Case To Come Up In Heights Court Fri.," New York Amsterdam News (5 Sept. 1928): 1.
58. Langston Hughes, "Air Raid over Harlem," in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York, 1994), 185-188.
59. Dillon, "Harlem Drive Upon Italians Stirs Disorder."
60. Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 93. On Grace Campbell, a public speaker, see p. 103.
61. White and White, Stytin', 233.
62. Schuyler, "The Soap Box."
63. Rudolph Fisher, "Ringtail," Atlantic Monthly 1925, rpt. in The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher, ed. John McCluskey (Columbia, MO, 1987), 18-19.
64. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890-1930, 2nd ed. (New York, 1971), 33; Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue, 109-110.
65. "Elks March in Downpour of Rain," New York Amsterdam News (24 Aug. 1927): 4
66. Zora Neale Hurston, "Story in Harlem Slang," American Mercury 55 (July 1942): 84-96.
67. Rudolph Fisher, "Blades of Steel," Atlantic Monthly (Aug. 1927), rpt. in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins (New York, 1995), 110.
68. White and White, Stylin', 220-247.
69. Arthur P. Davis, "Growing Up in the New Negro Renaissance: 1920-1935," Negro American Literature Forum 2, no. 3, Protest and Propaganda Literature (Autumn 1968): 53-59, p. 54.
70. At the first annual Harlem Health Conference in 1929, participants were told that the death rate as a result of congestion was 40 percent higher than the rate for New York City as a whole, "Congestion Causes High Mortality," New York Times (24 Oct. 1929), rpt. in Harlem On My Mind, ed. Schoener, 81.
71. Rev. Father J. C. O'Flaherty, "An Exclusive Interview with Paul Robeson," West African Review (Aug. 1936): 12-13, rpt. in Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews 1918-1974, ed. Philip S. Foner (London, 1978), 114.
72. This is not to say that race and racism do not take other forms, for example, the assumptions made by radio listeners about the race to the person speaking, singing or playing. As Ann Stoler has argued, "racism is not really a visual ideology at all; physiological attributes only signal the nonvisual and more salient distinctions of exclusion on which racism rests." Ann Laura Stoler, "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, 1997), 203.
73. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993); Schmidt, Hearing Things, 7, 20-22.
74. Alain Locke, The Negro and His Music (Port Washington, N.Y., 1936), 135.
75. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), part 3. On African American interwar history-making see, among others, Robin D. G. Kelley, "'But a Local Phase of a World Problem': Black History's Global Vision, 1883-1950," Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (Dec. 1999): 1045-77; Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge, 1998); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Post: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 138-182; Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans, 1919-1939 (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
76. Carter G. Woodson wrote in the opening sentence to a 1921 article, "[t]he citizenship of the Negro in this country is a fiction." Carter G. Woodson, "Fifty Years of Negro Citizenship as Qualified by the United States Supreme Court," Journal of Negro History 6, no. 1 (Jan. 1921): 1-53, p. 1. Kelley notes that the essay "was reprinted and widely circulated three years later as a small booklet," "'But a Local Phase of a World Problem,'" 1049.