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Negro life in New York's Harlem

Chapter 12: X. HARLEM—MECCA OF THE NEW NEGRO
By Wallace Thurman
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About This Book

A lively, descriptive essay maps the neighborhood’s streets, avenues, and housing while portraying the complex social fabric of its roughly two hundred thousand residents from diverse backgrounds. It contrasts prosperous blocks and slums, traces daily street life and the rhythms of churches, theaters, clubs, and nightlife, and surveys amusements, rent parties, and local journalism. The author explores cultural energy and emerging identities associated with the New Negro movement while acknowledging economic pressures, overcrowding, and social tensions that shape community life and its role as a cultural focal point.

X. HARLEM—MECCA OF THE NEW NEGRO

Harlem, the so-called citadel of Negro achievement in the New World, the alleged mecca of the New Negro and the advertised center of colored America’s cultural renaissance. Harlem, a thriving black city, pulsing with vivid passions, alive with colorful personalities, and packed with many types and classes of people.

Harlem is a dream city pregnant with wide-awake realities. It is a masterpiece of contradictory elements and surprising types. There is no end to its versatile presentation of people, personalities and institutions. It is a mad medley.

There seems to be no end to its numerical and geographical growth. It is spreading north, east, south and west. It is slowly pushing beyond the barriers imposed by white people. It is slowly uprooting them from their present homes in the near vicinity of Negro Harlem as it has uprooted them before. There must be expansion and Negro Harlem is too much a part of New York to remain sluggish and still while all around is activity and expansion. As New York grows, so will Harlem grow. As Negro America progresses, so will Negro Harlem progress.

New York is now most liberal. There is little racial conflict, and there have been no inter-racial riots since the San Juan Hill days. The question is will the relations between New York Negro and New York white man always remain as tranquil as they are today? No one knows, and once in Harlem one seldom cares, for the sight of Harlem gives any Negro a feeling of great security. It is too large and too complex to seem to be affected in any way by such a futile thing as race prejudice.

There is no typical Harlem Negro as there is no typical American Negro. There are too many different types and classes. White, yellow, brown and black and all the intervening shades. North American, South American, African and Asian; Northerner and Southerner; high and low; seer and fool—Harlem holds them all, and strives to become a homogeneous community despite its motley hodge-podge of incompatible elements, and its self-nurtured or outwardly imposed limitations.