People — queer and not — laud the Harlem Renaissance, but there is disagreement on so many aspects. For instance, when was the actual Harlem Renaissance? The actual, temporal brackets? Authorities disagree. Yes, the early 1900s saw the stirrings of the great Black migration from the South to the North. Jobs! No Jim Crow! You can breathe!
But Harlem? Harlem was special. Waves of different immigrants had lived and left here at Manhattan’s tip for the preceding 300 years. By the late 1800s, a large Jewish population eventually settled, even despite signs like Keine Juden und Keine Hunde: No Jews and no dogs.
Italians came too. Jewish and Italian gangs ran the streets before the turn of the century, but they all gradually moved farther downtown. By the early 1900s, Harlem’s townhouses and boulevards had opened up to Black renters. With the usual supply of labor bottled up in Europe because of the war and white men drafted, war jobs provided steady pay for years.
Some say the Harlem Renaissance began with “Shuffle Along” in 1921, the first verifiable Broadway smash hit featuring an all-Black cast, with book and lyrics written by Black vaudevillians and music by the Black composer Eubie Blake (“Shuffle Along” also helped along the careers of Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson).
Yet January 16, 1919, had already roared in, with Prohibition’s reeking, giant maw trying to grind and swallow up anything that wasn’t “dry.” All the rural white Protestant fundies said this protected “our” children from the murderous evils of alcohol.
Men would no longer spend their wages in bars. No, they would go home to their families. Crime and violence would go down. R-i-g-h-t.
If there’s no legit white joint available to drink in and carry on? Well Harlem is open for business, baby!
February 18, 1919, saw the mustering-out of the U.S. Army’s 369th Infantry Unit from Harlem, dubbed “Hell Fighters” by the Germans. They triumphantly paraded up Fifth Avenue to riotous appreciation. Following their large and thrilling regimental band, they marched in tight formation until they got to Harlem’s outskirts. The band had introduced France to jazz, but now they banged out a raunchy version of “Daddy’s Home.” The crowds and vets raucously burst into each other, and these guys were in no hurry to leave.
Any basement or alley could become a gin joint. Black women set up beauty shops in their homes and on the streets. Other entrepreneurs set up numbers shops where people could gamble, often out of beauty parlors. Madame Stephanie St. Clair ran the largest numbers racket. She also put her money into legit business and dedicated herself to “lift up the race.”
Harlem glowed hot and would get hotter still. By 1928, 175,000 people lived in an area of less than three square miles — the largest concentration of Black people anywhere. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that Black cultural ferment bubbled up elsewhere in the U.S., such as Philadelphia, D.C., and Chicago, but queer excavations have been less rigorous there.
But Harlem? Even the advent of the Depression didn’t destroy everything. Sadly, many luminaries went abroad, escaped into academia, or just left. Sad too was the passing of the woman Langston Hughes called the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s,” A’Lelia Walker.
For all the joy she surely provided and the good deeds she did indeed do, she ultimately suffered fiscal and business setbacks like so many. On August 17, 1931, following a late-night snack of lobster, chocolate cake, and champagne, A’Lelia died from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 46. It was “[t]he end of the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem,” Hughes lamented. A’Lelia’s mansions were sold at fire sale prices, and one was simply razed.
But the Repeal of Prohibition on December 5, 1933, ensured the collapse of Harlem’s already woefully constrained economic life. Sickeningly, the Harlem “Race” Riot of March 19, 1935 — fanned by (false) reports that a shoplifting 16-year-old boy had been killed by police — demonstrated the toll exacted by the area’s ever-encroaching neglect and blight.
But what we call the Harlem Renaissance shaped American, Black, and queer culture in ways we’re still teasing out, almost a century later.