Can Harlem Bring Back The Black Mecca Era?

Ebony, August, 2001 by Kevin Chappell

IT'S Monday morning in Harlem, and the rising sun is taking dead aim at anything moving along 125th Street. On one comer, a Sister in a designer business suit and dreaded hair hustles to catch the A-train. On another corner, a Brother rearranges knick knacks outside his convenience store four times until he gets just the right look for his storefront sale. Across the street, a grocer and his box cutter go to work on a fresh shipment of produce to be sold at a sidewalk display.

The Dance Theatre of Harlem is performing at the Apollo, and the Black circus is in town. The Dave Matthews Band is playing at the Lenox Lounge this week. Several local jazz bands are onstage at the Cotton Club.

Around the corner, a retired couple plants azaleas outside their newly renovated brownstone. Next door to them, a young couple kisses each other goodbye as another work week begins. Up the street at City College, a young Brother and Sister discuss the mayoral race as they make it to their first class. Both agree that the Rev. Al Sharpton should have nm.

Over at Sylvia's soul food restaurant, the grease from the deep fryer begins to bubble as hundreds of legs, breasts, thighs and wings are massaged, pampered and peppered with spices. If you're a chicken, and your number is up, there s probably no better place to go out than at Sylvia's, cuddled alongside a mound of collard greens and a big hunk of hot corn bread.

This is Harlem, a bustling collage of homes, businesses, entertainment venues and restaurants occupying about 2 square miles in uptown Manhattan. The sights, sounds and smells emanating from here have returned after more than a 50-year absence. Not long ago, Harlem was a community down-and-out---street after street of abandoned houses, boarded-up storefronts and burntout buildings. Left for dead, Harlem's pride was the only thing that kept it alive during the days when the streets were controlled, in large part, by pushers and pimps, and deserted by the Black middle class.

But today, the flavor is back in the neighborhood that was once called "the Black Mecca of the world." Not only are businesses back, but the Black middle class is back. Houses are being rebuilt and entrepreneurship is in full bloom. There's a Starbucks, a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, a new state-of-the-art movie theater opened by Magic Johnson, and enough high-speed data wires criss-crossing the area to attract some top technology companies. Harlem hadn't had a supermarket in 40 years. Now it boasts the largest grocery store in Manhattan.

The result has been what some are calling "Harlem's Second Renaissance," the recreation of the, Black folks' "heaven on Earth." And while some of Harlem's mainstays say they don't want this renewal to be anything like the last, when Blacks were pretty much relegated to the role of entertainer, everyone agrees that the rebuilding (and White peoples' interest in getting in on the action) has created an undeniable buzz throughout the neighborhood.

It's an excitement not seen since the 1020s--the fabulous '20s--when Langston Hughes penned his thoughts about the area's cultural explosion, much of which he witnessed through the window of his room at the Harlem YMCA on 135th Street. It was "a period when local and visiting royalty were not at all uncommon in Harlem," Hughes wrote. "And when the parties of A'Lelia Walker, the Negro heiress, were filled with guests whose names would turn any Nordic social climber green with envy ... It was a period when every season there was at least one hit play on Broadway acted by a Negro cast ... It was the period when the Negro was in vogue. It was a time of the Charleston and the Black Bottom, of Shuffle Along and Florence Mills, of bathtub gin and knee-high skirts."

During the '20s, Harlem was a place for dreamers and dreams, artists and musicians, thinkers and philosophers. It attracted people from all over the country, and all over the world. Some sought a better life for their families. Others sought an atmosphere where freedom of thought and expression were cherished. And still others sought an escape from the riots, lynchings and increased animosity between Blacks and Whites following World War I.

All saw Harlem as the answer to the problems that Blacks faced, a place for the new Negro to rise. And, in some respects, it was. But, as any astute schoolboy knows, the Harlem Renaissance fell short in many areas. "I'm not going to knock people's dreams. It's so romantic, the mere mention of the Harlem Renaissance," says Harlem native Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N. Y. "But my grandfather came to New York City at the turn of the century, and he used to tell me about Harlem during the Renaissance period. When we talk about the great '20s, it was only great for the rich White folks, not even the middle-class White folks. Blacks just worked there. There was no crystal stair for Blacks in Harlem during the Renaissance."

And, for what it was worth, the Renaissance didn't last long. For whatever Harlem gave Blacks in the 1920s, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that soon followed took it away. Blacks were the first to lose jobs, and Black culture was the first to be dismissed by Whites. Without the necessary economic infrastructure built on home and business ownership, the Black community in Harlem began a downward spiral. As quick as Harlem was born, Harlem began to die.