A'Lelia walker's dark tower

Through streets crowded with thousands of curious onlookers, A'Lelia Walker's funeral cortege left Harlem and wended its way to the Bronx. A single airplane piloted by Col. Hubert Julian, dubbed by the New York press as The Black Eagle, circled overhead as if keeping a celestial vigil. Just before the interment at Woodlawn Cemetery, Julian, according to New York's Amsterdam News, "descended noiselessly from the heavens and dropped a final floral tribute to the memory of the dead heiress." Poet Langston Hughes, who had written a poem for the funeral, later recalled that Walker's death was "really the end of the gay time of the New Negro Era in Harlem."

In the 1920s, the thrice-married A'Lelia Walker Robinson Wilson Kennedy, daughter of millionaire Madam C. J. Walker, dazzled Harlem with her parties and soirees. An engraved invitation to one of Walker's parties at either her fabulously furnished townhouse on West 136th Street or her more intimate apartment on Edgecomb Avenue was, as they might have said at the time, "the cat's meow." Walker also owned a mansion in Irvington-on-the-Hudson but did not frequent it often. Her mother had stipulated in her will that the mansion, Villa Lewaro, should be donated to the NAACP after A'Lelia's death. But, when A Lelia Walker died in 1931, the NAACP declined the house because of the upkeep and taxes. (In 1919, her mother had given the largest gift the ten-year-old NAACP had ever received for its antilynching campaign.)

Present at A'Lelia Walker's expensively catered events in Harlem would be an array of artists-poets, novelists, journalists, painters, musicians, socialites, gamblers and Pullman Car porters. According to a story that is probably apocryphal, at one of these soirees the white guests were served pig's feet and chitterlings while the black guests dined on champagne and caviar. At another, the Crown Prince of Sweden sent a message that he was outside and couldn't get in. Instead of buzzing him in, Walker sent down a bottle of champagne by one of her servants.

Not all of Harlem's high society appreciated A'Lelia Walker's parties. David Lewis, historian and a board member of Crisis, wrote in his book When Harlem Was In Vogue that Grace Nail Johnson, James Weldon Johnson's wife and Harlem's social dictator, "would as soon have done the Black Bottom on Lenox Avenue as cross A'Lelia's threshold." For that crowd Walker had not attended college; was the daughter of a washer woman who became wealthy by trying to make black women's hair look like white women's; and, most important, was thick lipped, broad nosed and dark.

None of that bothered Walker. She had something they didn't have-lots and lots of money. She supported the arts in a way they couldn't. For example, Walker used a section of her 136th Street townhouse as a meeting place for the young Harlem Renaissance artists and called it "The Dark Tower." While Crisis provided a place for young artists to present their works, A'Lelia Walker offered them a place to create their works.