Harlem Today

...But perhaps Harlem's most obvious difference for the white Northerner is its food...

...The other listened for a moment and then said, "I still think he's from the police...

...They hate deeply: the middle-class leaders of the Civil Rights movement, the Jewish shopkeepers (anti-Semitism is a persistent Muslim theme), the world of white America...

...The white has been The Man...

...But then, in a few years, they learn...

...The sign says: "As Noah Was Before The Flood So Is Daddy Grace Before the Fire...

...The Puerto Rican comes from an island in which his countrymen increasingly run stores and manage offices...

...On 125th Street there is Daddy Grace's second story loft, and on a warm evening, the sound of the meeting spills out rapturously onto the avenue...

...Then it was time for the movie and we all went in to this little movie and saw a movie about America...

...In a casual walk through Harlem, you will see advertised some of these things: chitterlings, ham knuckles, hog maw, pigs feet, pigs tail, pigs ears—and fish is everywhere...

...The figures could be piled on and on, but the point is obvious: Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant are centers of poverty, of sickness, of unemployment, of suffering...

...When I looked up, everyone was watching me...

...This was, true even before the big migration of Puerto Ricans in the post-war period...

...These churches are not charming and quaint...

...Like the young Negroes of The Cool World, Harlem watches all the wonderful movies about America with a certain bitter cynicism...

...To live in Harlem is to be a Negro...

...are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and the courts, there will yet remain the profound, institutionalized and abiding wrong which white America has worked on the Negro for centuries...

...The Church was the one really Negro institution which developed under slavery and continues in the Jim Crow South...

...Harlem lives much of its life in the streets...

...there is a Fair Employment Practices law, a State Commission Against Discrimination, a municipal Open Occupancy law...

...Many of the lodges and fraternal orders have death benefit plans...

...A lot of the children from the poorest families simply breakfast on cold coffee...

...In Birmingham or Atlanta or Shreveport, the Negro community is under great pressure, but it is moving, walking, fighting back...

...Writing on Harlem in 1940, Claude McKay traced this pattern all the way back to the twenties when the Puerto Ricans lived only on the fringe of Harlem...

...The children, he said, are very proud when they first come to school...

...In this group, 50 per cent of the families had incomes under $4000 a year (as compared with 20 per cent of the white families...

...11 "Bledsoe, you're a shameless chitterling eater...

...He is an intransigeant, a demagogue, a rogue—and unquestionably one of the most popular Negro leaders one can find...

...Their street meetings never even approach the size of the mass rallies of the mainstream Civil Rights movement...

...On the race issue, his very flamboyance sometimes achieves results...

...Each group in the United States, each ghetto, is distinctive in the way it eats...

...For all of the vigor of Powell, and of Negro politics in Harlem, this is part of the tragedy of racism, too...

...does the Negro want out, does this group have as much aspiration and drive as others...

...For that matter, there is an advantage to this way of eating...

...It exists in the midst of a city where liberal rhetoric is required for election to public office...

...In every part of its existence, Harlem must deal with unemployment as a permanent condition...

...The Negro prostitutes on 125th Street are much better looking than the white girls who come up to work the same block...

...Yet they strike a nerve...

...Paradoxically, this is much more true in the North than in an embattled Negro community in the South...

...It is the result of a long experience, of a wise and inbred fear of the cop and the finance man and practically every other white (except the welfare worker who can be a source of help...

...their vivid image of the afterlife is simply a passionate inversion of the sordid present...

...RELIGION IS, of course, one of the most obvious things about Harlem...

...Harlem is big, teeming and brassy...

...One of the best answers to this question (and a complete answer is still not possible) has been given by the sociologist, Nathan Glazer, who writes that the problem is that the Negro lives too close to white society, yet segregated from it...

...Yet now, for the first time, there may be developing a new direction...

...To begin with, Powell is a minister and his political position rests, in part, on a Church constituency of well over 10,000 members...

...Does the Negro, because of his humiliation in white America, lack the aspirations of the national groups who come in from the outside...

...I stopped on Lenox Avenue to take down some prices in the window of a barbecue joint...

...During the fierce Harlem riot in World War II, popular rage was directed against these shops...

...Ellison's cry—his hero is accusing a prominent Negro of the secret vice of eating chitterlings—is heard in almost every novel of Negro life...

...Harlem is Hollywood carried to its logical conclusion, the poet Thomas Merton wrote), yet he is desperately and often hopelessly poor...

...And for good reason...

...When I was preparing this essay, I was walking around Harlem with a notebook...

...But Harlem is a Negro capital, much as New York is an unofficial American capital...

...BECAUSE HARLEM is Negro, it is poor...

...often there will be fights...

...A friend tells me: Negroes have energy because they eat things the white folks won't touch...

...Some candidate had taken on the impossible task of trying to unseat Powell...

...An Lonsome Pine unscrewed the arm of his chair with a dime...

...He is not a conservative, machine politician like Congressman Dawson of Chicago...

...Kenneth Clark writes, "Consciously or unconsciously, and no matter how much we might rebel against it, we all had accepted the fact of second-class status...

...At the Apollo, there is some of the most uninhibited carrying-on to be found in a public place in New York...

...and in many, many cases, he still is...

...the lowest rate in a white New York district was 15.4 per thousand...

...To be sure, Powell has a certain kind of effectiveness...

...The whites will spend a major portion of their budget on a roast, and then live on spaghetti, or marcaroni or potatoes...

...This Muslim appeal also relates to the political fortunes of Harlem...

...He participates in the consumption cult (the Negro is an "exaggerated American" Myrdal said...

...Their aspiration is beaten out of them by the system, by the structure of discrimination in liberal New York...

...But he has an apartment in New York, and a place in Washington, and he's seen in night clubs, and he travels to Europe all the time, and he's hardly ever in the Congress...

...One of the old stereotypes is, like almost every stereotype, a part truth...

...The most recent variations on this theme are played by Muslim orators who relate it to a proArab, anti-Israel line...

...Negroes formed the majority of persons receiving Home Relief and Aid to Dependent Children— and they made up 40 per cent of all the people getting public assistance...

...In Harlem where the numbers game is still a community pastime, where streetwalking still flourishes on 125th Street, and where marijuana is easily come by, that is natural enough...

...At the same time, they have a certain pride and forcefulness...

...It is not the solidest or the best organized Negro community (Negro political representation came to Chicago a full decade before New York...

...If this is the case, and there is evidence that it is, then the most profound implication of the Supreme Court decision deals not so much with equality before the law but with beginning a reversal of the old Negro psychology...

...The Negro in Harlem, as Ralph Ellison has written of him, is often "shot up from the South into the busy city like wild jacks-in-the-box broken loose from our springs—so sudden that our gait becomes like that of deep-sea divers suffering from the bends...

...The social class of a Negro Church can be ascertained by ear: the higher the class, the less commotion...

...Because Harlem is poor, it is Negro, that is, it exhibits qualities of hopelessness, of passivity, of acceptance that ignorant or malicious people try to ascribe to the "nature" of the Negro...

...Harry Ashmore writes in The Other Side of Jordan that the ordinary man on Harlem's street will not join the Muslims, but feels a certain satisfaction when he hears his deepest hates and fears made articulate...

...Those who have lived in grinding poverty all their lives, and who are deeply religious, look to dying as a moment of style and status...

...The Cool World, by Warren Miller...

...The point becomes obvious when one thinks of the Harlem schools...

...It is more than religion: it is the meeting place, the moment of freedom and expressiveness...

...Then they were gone...

...But practically no one knows the food of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant...

...And the fact of Harlem is often intangible, a matter of the culture of poverty rather than of its income and housing indices...

...The Muslims are part of this tradition, but in a different way...

...Knowing what they thought, I turned to the two men nearest me and said, "I'm not a cop...

...Their fantasy is not of a great Beyond, but of a colored world in the here and now...

...Mailer over-generalizes his point, yet he catches the importance of fear in Harlem, and its role in the political economy of Negro poverty...

...He was speaking at a street meeting and, the legend goes, Powell was parked in a car on the fringe of the crowd...

...to be a Negro is to be subjected to a culture of poverty and fear which cuts far deeper than any law concerning discrimination...

...THESE EXPLANATIONS rest on a common assumption: that the aspiration, or lack of it, among the Negroes of Harlem is the result of what white America has done...

...This group has a fierce desire to move, to change—a lawyer in Harlem is still likely to be introduced as "Attorney so and so"—and to break into American life...

...But it goes even deeper than the immediate and practical concern of an area that has more than its share of illegality...

...But the more obvious and striking ones are the storefronts, the Islamic centers, the Holy Dove Church of Christ with a picture in the window showing God as a Negro...

...Yet even this class bears the frightful marks of segregation...

...Negro unemployment in the city was somewhat more than double that of the whites, and wages were around half of what the white workers got...

...To do something about Harlem—to unlock the "keyless aviaries" of its high buildings (the phrase is Thomas Merton's) —is not simply a matter of Civil Rights, of equality before the law...

...It is composed of politicians and professionals, of Civil Servants (one of the traditional areas of Negro access to some decent jobs), even of union organizers...

...It is not the most depressed, even in the New York area—that honor belongs to BedfordStuyvesant over in Brooklyn...

...Alfred Kazin has a charming memory in A Walker in the Streets: that in Brownsville, at the height of the depression, there was always money for soda or other extras...

...On the nicer blocks of Harlem (for the middle class lives in the midst of the poor in a great part of the Negro world), the gutters are not filled with refuse, and there are signs in front of the neat brownstones, "Positively No Loitering Or Sitting On Rail Or Stoop...

...The young Muslim is likely to be one of the neatest, most carefully groomed men on the street...

...trations of a discriminatory society, a curse upon the tokenism of integration in the United States...

...Another way of dealing with this aspect of Harlem life is suggested by Norman Mailer's image of the White Negro: that the Negro, always threatened with the violence of white society, develops a defense mechanism of coolness, of hip, a sort of passive protest, a cautious kind of disaffiliation...

...This affected every other aspect of life: in 1959, the infant mortality rate in Central Harlem was 45.3 per thousand...

...When I walked over and started to tell them that I was a writer, one accepted the story...

...It is a political and religious utopia which moves them, a response to the frus...

...White America long ago enforced that equation, and it gives to Negro poverty its special characteristic, it makes the breakthrough even more difficult...

...BUT IF THE STRUCTURE of Harlem politics is that of an independent Democratic barony with much less power than it claims, the leading figure of its political life, Adam Clayton Powell, is a figure rich with implication...

...In the Amsterdam News, a columnist asks, "Has eating hog kept the Race Back...

...i `If the population density in some of Harlem's worst blocks obtained in the rest of New York City, the entire population of the 37I United States could fit into three of New York's boroughs"—Civil Rights Commission, 1959...

...They seem to be as numerous as the churches and the bars...

...He is neither of the society, nor out of it...

...If there are more idle men, there are also more funeral parlors in Harlem than in any part of New York...

...There is, for example, fear, the imminence of The Man...

...Flash Gordon he was sittin in front of me slash the back of the seat and all the stuffin started fallin out...

...In some ways Harlem is different...

...Adam Powell," he said, "is a Congressman and a minister...

...The question always arises...

...an absentee Congressman, an erratic leader, a sort of a Negro James Michael Curley, loyal to the group and with an air of gay corruption...

...But he is also a politician who thrives on backwardness...

...The statistics on Negro unemployment may be abstract and distant...

...The Supreme Court decision of May, 1954, and the growth of a mass Civil Rights movement may also be a crucial element in breaking the old pattern...

...For one thing, most of the rooms in Harlem are so small, dingy, and mean that the bars are always crowded...

...In the afternoon, the bars along the big avenues are jammed...

...Why man," a friend said, "if they did that in any other part of town, the preachers would have the place closed down in a minute...

...But the statistics tend to mask the miserable reality because they deal with measurable things...

...In recent years he has defied the Democratic leadership in New York, bolted the national ticket to Eisenhower, and been the center of more scandal, law suits and general gossip than any ten other Negroes in the United States...

...an afternoon block of milling, waiting men is not...

...Sometimes there will be a crap game in the street (as soon as a white comes into sight, it will suspend operations with lightning speed...

...A lot of the violence of Harlem, or of any slum, is the inevitable result of enforced mass idleness, of life in the streets...

...In any Puerto-Rican section of New York the situation is quite different, for almost as soon as the Puerto Ricans arrive, Spanish-speaking shops dot the avenue...

...To be white is to be The Man...

...It goes much deeper than that, it requires an attack on a culture of discrimination and poverty, on the consequences of over a century of oppression...

...Part of the distance of the Negro from white America is expressed in this diet...

...The poor everywhere tend toward spiritualism, the combination of the mystic and frenzied, a release from the misery of this world...

...By contrast, the Muslims appeal to the sense of violent desperation many Negroes feel in regard to the present, and the measureless yearning in regard to the future...

...When the proprietor (or salesmen, rent agent, or numbers boss) is Jewish, this becomes a traditional source of Negro anti-Semitism...

...They show off their books, they are interested, they are friendly with white teachers...

...When asked by a teacher or welfare worker what they ate that morning, the children, recognizing the figure of The Man, will usually reply, "Juice, and bacon and eggs and cereal and milk...

...The whole issue can be posed simply by comparing the streets of Negro Harlem with those of Spanish Harlem where the Puerto Ricans live...

...The Muslims are a minority in Harlem...

...It cannot house itself as a middle class, it is still part of the Negro culture of poverty—even though it has money...

...A welfare worker in Harlem puts it in human terms...

...From the crowd someone yelled, "Man, that's really living...

...But then, that is part of the perennial sparring between the poor and Welfare...

...It is where Marcus Garvey established the center of his EmpireinExile, where Joe Louis was cheered after he knocked out Max Schmeling, where Fidel Castro came after the Cuban Revolution...

...In the years of relative postwar prosperity, a larger middle class is coming into existence in Harlem and in the Negro world in general...

...They have the same intensity, but with more violence...

...The result is that the whites are much more prone to the classic health problems of poverty (overweight, anemia, cardiac) than the Negroes...

...In a place like New York, a good many people know the foods of the various nations because of the ghettoes...

...When the lights went on we made a lot of noise and Mister Shapiro hussled us out an never noticed the damage...

...Related to this is the fact that the Negro community in the North is not even a generation removed from Southern backwardness...

...This fear is on the very surface of Harlem life...

...It also may be a deep and important part of what has been done to the Negro by white America...

...It show rivers an factories & farms & mountains & a workinman in a blue shirt buying socks...

...Everywhere you see men who are just standing...

...The Negroes, with a tradition of cheap foods, have a much more balanced diet, even if it is composed of fat back and greens...

...Some of Harlem's Churches are, like Adam Powell's Abyssinian Baptist, impressive structures...

...But as long as the reality of Harlem is as miserable as it is, the religious imagination will soar...

...And nevertheless, as everyone knows, the white man is still way ahead...

...For the Negro poor, death is often the only moment in life that permits a luxury...

...Finally, however, Harlem is much the same as any other Negro ghetto...

...The story is funny enough, but at bottom it is made of the same stuff as Amos 'n' Andy: the laughing, childlike, pleasure-loving Negro who must be patronized and taken care of...

...Why is there this difference...

...Harlem is brassy, rocking and rolling...

...Traditionally middle-class Negroes have tried to disown this fervid, mystic religiosity but they speak only for themselves...

...So it is that the under-developed economy of Harlem supports a ubiquitous industry of death...

...The schools are crowded, the instruction is inferior (there are more substitute teachers in Harlem than anywhere else), the neighborhood is omnipresent and more powerful than the classroom...

...I accuse you of relishing hog bowels...

...In this sense, Harlem could well be a warning: that after the racist statutes...

...In our self-proclaimed society of affluence, he has the worst of all worlds...

...First the statistics: grim, dreary and predictable...

...But there is no point in making Harlem's food the basis for a new myth of the "happy" Negro...

...The Negro arrived at Tammany Hall in the late thirties—when Tammany's power was on the decline and Democratic Party leadership meant less than it had in the past...

...Since then, there has been a steady gain in the appearance of Negro political strength—Adam Powell's Congressional seat, the Borough Presidency of Manhattan, in effect a "Negro" office, and so on—while very little has changed in the life of Harlem...

...For all its noise and brashness, its ubiquitous rhythms of rock-'n'roll, Harlem is afraid...

...The Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison...

...In this case, the Negro is probably the victim of the general muddle of politics in New York, as James Wilson argues in his Negro Politics...

...In the mid-fifties (the last point for which figures are available) , there were almost one million Negroes in New York...

...One story which Powell has been said to tell of himself reveals the poverty of Negro politics in Harlem as of a piece with all the rest of the poverty there...

...For the Negro, for Harlem, this is doubly true...

...Walking down 125th Street, one quickly comes to see that Harlem's economy is white...

...Practically all of the stores are presided over by white men, and this has been true for years...

...After the decision] for the first time the Negro felt that he was a man in his own right and that his government would help him prove it...

...In Los Angeles, a welfare worker remarks that the Negroes live better on relief than the whites...

...There is no legal segregation...

...In New York, where all the official rhetoric is anti-discrimination and the unofficial reality is segregation, membership in the NAACP means paying two dollars a year and not much more...