A Slum Is Born

...Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz In recent years we have witnessed A such a flood of books about the Negro in America, many of them rehashing information contained in their predecessors (too many, indeed, just glossing Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma of 1944), that it is gratifying to discover a book about urban Negroes that contains unfamiliar material...

...Osofsky, to his credit, avoids fabricating an overarching scheme about the growth of a segregated neighborhood, and his book is valuable for its detailed accounts of lesser known phenomena, such as his step-by-step history of the transformation of Harlem from an upper-class watering place to a Negro slum...

...A ghetto is an enclave of people with a culture alien to the country's norm, such as neighborhoods of immigrant Jews early in the Twentieth Century...

...successful businessmen, like Watt Terry and John E. Nail (both in real estate...

...The difference is considerable, and an imprecise use of this term confuses an essential issue...

...Gilbert Osofsky's Harlem: The Making of A Ghetto is a thoroughly documented history of the major Negro section in New York from 1890, before the great migration, to 1930, when Harlem assumed its present character...

...He also traces the cultural differences between the entrepreneurial West Indians and the more dilatory American Negroes...

...This scholarly theory, like other published notions about Negroes, was based upon insufficient first-hand evidence...

...A boom in the building of fine apartment houses around the turn of the century created a situation in which supply exceeded demand...

...What Osofsky's book details, to be more accurate, is the making of a community...

...As the historian Richard Bardolph put it, the Negro has built a "black replica of white American culture on his own side of the line...

...The Negro's culture is quintessential^ American, despite all the vain, mistaken attempts to revive African consciousness...

...The result was that Negroes inherited what is probably the most elegantly and spaciously designed section of New York...

...for, as Osofsky points out, organizations like "The Sons of North Carolina" have long been a force in Harlem life...

...the teacher, William L. Bulkey...

...While the ghetto-dweller must adjust himself to the existing American culture, the Negro's problem is that white Americans have not yet fully adjusted to his presence...

...the construction mogul, Philip A. Payton Jr...

...The best parts of Osofsky's book trace the careers of Harlem's leaders, such as the politican, Charles W. Anderson...

...I would go one step further than Osofsky to say that West Indians had an immigrant culture, not unlike that of the Jews, whereas the Negro Americans were essentially migrant, like the Okies in California...

...Osofsky's dogged research should refute some conventional misconceptions...

...For instance, many a commentator some years ago conjectured that urban Negroes would be more prosperous if they had the landesman societies that proliferated in, say, the Jewish ghetto...

...Builders eagerly unloaded the surplus upon Negro real estate agents who, in turn, rapidly expanded their operations...

...The glaring deficiency is Osofsky's minimal concern with Harlem's diverse and lively cultural life, which was more thoroughly covered in James Weldon Johnson's neglected memoir, Black Manhattan (1930...

...Still, Osofsky's book, except perhaps in the number of its minor facts, is superior to Seth M. Scheiner's history of some of the same material, Negro Mecca, published last year...

...The American Negro resembles most of white America in speaking the same language, believing in the same religions and the same Constitution, adhering to nearly all the same values, reading the same advertisements, and wearing more or less the same clothes...

...Although the error has been codified in books by respected scholars, Harlem is not a "ghetto" but a segregated community...

...and the hairstraighten-er, Madame C. J. Walker...