Songs of the soul: the Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1935 - Special Report - Statistical Data Included

Current Events, Feb 8, 2002

HOT NIGHTS and cool jazz ... steamy sidewalks and fancy dressers ... songs of the soul and songs of the body ... the lilt of gentle laughter and the penetrating wail of the blues ...

That was Harlem in the 1920s and early 1930s--a place that vibrated night and day with excitement, promise, glitter, and joy.

If you had visited Harlem in those days, you might have heard bandleader Duke Ellington playing "Take the `A' Train" (the subway to Harlem) at the Cotton Club or Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong shaking up the jazz world with his trumpet playing at Connie's Inn. The place was swinging, but not just with music. Harlem was also the home of African American poets, novelists, actors, and philosophers. So great was the cultural explosion of Harlem during the 1920s and early 1930s that the period has since been called "the Harlem Renaissance." Renaissance is a French word meaning "rebirth." It is generally applied to any great outburst of artistic and intellectual creativity.

Harlem is a community in New York City that lies in the northern part of the borough of Manhattan. It is bounded roughly by 110th Street on the south, 155th Street on the north, Madison Avenue on the east, and Convent Avenue on the west.

But don't make the mistake of measuring Harlem by its boundaries. Harlem has always been measured by a spirit and way of life that have touched all of America and have created a legacy that continues to inspire today.

Harlem got its name from the original Dutch settlers of Manhattan Island. Around 1650, when the Dutch were calling southern Manhattan "New Amsterdam," they named the northern part of Manhattan after the town of Haarlem in the Netherlands. For the next two and a half centuries, Harlem remained a rather quiet white community. African Americans began to move into the neighborhood in significant numbers only about 1900. The reasons: A real estate crash in Harlem made homes mere more affordable, and a race riot in southern Manhattan, where many Africans had settled, sent many black families in search of new homes.

The riot was touched off on Aug. 12, 1900, when a black man killed a white plainclothes police officer while the officer was attempting to arrest the man's wife at Eighth Avenue and 41st Street. On August 15, white gangs began roaming the area, beating and killing African Americans. From then on, said a black eyewitness, "every day was moving day."

Most moved to Harlem, which soon became the neighborhood of choice for New York City's blacks. Harlem also drew increasing numbers of black people from Southern states. Economic depression, failed farms, and worsening racial tensions sparked a huge migration from the rural South to jobs in industrial areas of New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland.

In Manhattan, the African American population north of 130th Street jumped from 91,709 in 1910 to 327,706 in 1930. During that time, it became the largest, densest, and most famous black neighborhood in the United States. People began calling Harlem "the Negro capital of America."

Star-Studded Group

With the multitude of black people who flocked to Harlem looking for a better life in the 1920s came a star-studded group of poets, writers, musicians, and artists. All were eager to bask in the freedom of city life and the growing excitement of Harlem. Unlike the South's cities and towns, New York City made African Americans feel free to express themselves, to create, to fully tell the story of the African American experience in words, pictures, paintings, and, most popularly, music.

In the 1920s, African American music was the rage. Every night, white people took taxis and subways uptown to Harlem to listen and dance to music by black musicians and singers at the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom. White publishers went to Harlem to find black writers and poets to publish. In the 1920s, black people, in Harlem at least, began to feel that they were an important part of the nation's cultural life.

No doubt about it: In the 1920s and early '30s, Harlem was a joint that jumped in many ways. Here are some of the famous names that made the Harlem Renaissance what it was:

Music. In 1927, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington began a fabled career as a bandleader, composer, and pianist with a four-year stint at Harlem's Cotton Club. A succession of popular radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club made his name famous throughout the world. Ellington composed such songs as "Mood Indigo" and "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing." Ellington's band made the Cotton Club the "in" place to be in New York City. But he wasn't alone.

Jazz singer Lena Horne and legendary blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937) also began their famous careers during the days of the Harlem Renaissance.

Ellington was once asked what Harlem was like during those heady days. Without hesitating a moment, he answered, "Why, it [was] just like the Arabian Nights."

Literature. Creative African Americans were making great music with words as well as notes. Harlem in the '20s and early '30s supported some of the greatest black writers America has produced.