James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan and the Kingdom of American Culture

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Michael Nowlin

No doubt Johnson protests too much in repeatedly asserting that Harlem is "not a 'quarter' or a slum or a fringe" (BM 4), as though disavowing the weight of common knowledge attaching to the contrary claim. That claim found more room in the famous March 1925 issue of the Survey Graphic than it would in The New Negro anthology that grew out of it under Alain Locke's editorship. In his introduction to the journal issue, Locke could still rather tortuously concede that while "in the final analysis, Harlem is neither slum, ghetto, resort or colony ... it is in part all of them" ("Harlem" 629). Kelly Miller described Harlem as manifesting "the most gigantic instance of racial segregation in the United States ..." and "a fair specimen of the harvest of race prejudice throughout the United States." While he thought it "a city within a city," as did Johnson, Miller insisted that it was "a part of, and yet apart from the general life of greater New York" ("Harvest" 683). Even more emphatically, Eunice Roberta Hunton declared Harlem "a modern ghetto," and underlined the lack of genuine traffic between the black and white cities: only an educated few enjoyed "New York in its entirety" or "the opportunity of giving Harlem to New York and New York to Harlem" (684). And Winthrop Lane catalogued "the grim side of Harlem," in particular the "ways in which the Negro is more deliberately exploited in Harlem than in other Northern cities" (692-93). (3) Locke cut his ambiguous sentence from the opening essay he wrote for The New Negro, took from Miller a more uplifting (and promotional) piece on Howard University, and dropped Hunton and Lane from the book project entirely. (4) The keynote of The New Negro as much as Johnson's later Black Manhattan (in anticipation of one of the best received African American cultural achievements ever, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man) was biracial or even transracial cultural possibility.

Johnson's book, like Locke's New Negro anthology, is certainly vulnerable to the charge of downplaying the continuous economic injustice and social discrimination afflicting Harlemites in the 1920s (Levy 318), though it would be far from precise to say that it ignores these, as I shall demonstrate below. By his late retrospective account in Along This Way (hereafter ATW), the Southern-born Johnson's deep fondness for New York City originated in childhood longing, a longing underscored by family legend and whetted by his first boyhood visit:

   It would not have taken a psychologist
   to understand that I was born to be a
   New Yorker. In fact, I was partly a
   New Yorker already. Even then I had a
   dual sense of home. From the time that
   I could distinguish the meaning of
   words I had been hearing about New
   York. My parents talked about the city
   much in the manner that exiles or emigrants
   talk about the homeland; and I
   had long thought of New York, as well
   as Jacksonville, as my home. But being
   born for a New Yorker means being
   born, no matter where, with a love for
   cosmopolitanism; and one either is or
   is not. (47-48)