Washington Post Book Reviews
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Sunday February 27, 2011
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HARLEM: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America
Jonathan Gill
Grove
ISBN 978-0802119100
520 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
In September 1609 the English explorer Henry Hudson, en route -- or so he hoped -- to China in a ship belonging to the Dutch East India Company and called the Half Moon, steered into the river that in time would bear his name. He was attacked by native residents of the northern part of the island they called Manahatta. Blood was shed, and lives were lost, "a foretaste of Harlem's future," Jonathan Gill writes. He continues:
"The clash of words and worlds, the allure of blood and money, the primacy of violence and fashion, the cohabitation of racial hatred and racial curiosity -- they have always been part of what uptown means. But from its days as a frontier outpost, to the time when it seemed like the navel of the black universe, to the era when it became the official symbol of poverty in America, Harlem has always been more than a tragedy in the making. ... Through it all, Harlem's contending forces of power and protest, intention and improvisation, greed and generosity, and sanctity and suspicion decisively shaped the American character."
This may seem at first glance the exaggeration of a historian trying to make a case for the importance of his subject, but there is a good deal of truth to it. Though Harlem's strongest claim on history's attention indeed is its long role as the de facto capital of black America, Gill's account of what has occurred there in the four centuries since Hudson's arrival makes plain that there is much more to the story than that. Harlem was settled by the Dutch, who were then displaced by the British, who were themselves dealt a serious blow by George Washington in the Battle of Harlem Heights. In the two centuries that followed, Harlem served as a resort for the wealthy of lower Manhattan, transformed itself from a bucolic community to an urban metropolis, was "one of the largest Jewish communities in the world," and then, early in the 20th century, became the true heart of the African-American population, which it has remained ever since.
Gill, a historian who has taught at Columbia and is on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, has done a stupendous amount of research, some of which might best have been left in his files. Though his "Harlem" certainly is authoritative and exhaustive, in addition to being well-written and perceptive, it also is exhausting and would have gained from being cut by at least 50 pages. Many of the details of Harlem's political life could have been set aside, and some of the portraits of its most notable and familiar figures -- Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin, Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, Langston Hughes, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. et al. -- would have lost nothing by being briefer.
It seems fair, though, to consider this excessive length as a sign of the author's enthusiasm for his subject. We are in Gill's debt for digging so deeply into Harlem's past, for describing it with no agenda beyond thoroughness and fairness, and for reminding us that there is so much in Harlem to honor and celebrate as well as to deplore and lament. It is one of the most significant neighborhoods in the country, and its contributions -- in social leadership, in literature and the arts -- have been huge and invaluable.
Except perhaps for the years after the Civil War, when Harlem was "the choicest spot on the island for horse racing, yachting, cricket, sleighing, swimming, and skating or simply glorying in the beautiful vistas and virgin forests that remained," Harlem has never had it easy. In its early years, when the Dutch called it Nieuw Haarlem -- why is a matter of continuing debate -- tensions and conflicts between the settlers and the natives were constant, and savage depredations were committed by both sides. Despite Washington's victory at Harlem Heights, by the end of the Revolution Harlem was "totally unoccupied, abandoned by the Americans and destroyed by the British." As Manhattan began to grow and prosper at its lower and middle ends, Harlem often felt itself a neglected stepchild, or, when attention was paid, felt itself at the mercies of more powerful people and institutions to the south.
That Harlem was an important Jewish center in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is now often forgotten, yet among those who grew up there were George Gershwin, Lorenz Hart and the Marx Brothers, whose contributions to American culture are incalculably large. But with the arrival of a large black settlement around the turn of the 20th century, Harlem found the identity it has had ever since. It is useful to be reminded, however, that "there had been a significant and continuous uptown black presence, free and enslaved, since the 1630s. Some owned property, practicing their trades in peace and profit, and by 1703 a census of northern Manhattan counted thirty-three black men, thirteen black women, and twenty-six black children." By the 1880s "there was a real estate agent who specialized in houses and apartments for Negroes along Second and Third Avenues below East 125th Street, then Manhattan's second-biggest Negro neighborhood." That, though, was only the beginning:
"Historians may argue about when the New Negro movement became the Harlem Renaissance, but they all agree that by the end of World War I something new was happening uptown, and it wasn't just Prohibition, which was an economic godsend, at least in the short run. The seeds of political and economic change that Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, and so many others had sown were resulting in a cultural harvest that would include the poems of Langston Hughes, the songs of Duke Ellington, the vocal recitals of Paul Robeson, the films of Oscar Micheaux, and the photographs of James Van Der Zee.
However dire economic conditions might have been in the tenements along the side streets, Harlem was becoming the 'joy spot of America,' according to Billboard magazine."
This coexistence of creative excitement and grinding poverty has been a constant in Harlem for at least a century -- in Spanish Harlem on the East Side as well as Black Harlem to the north and west -- and it is treated with care by Gill. Even as Ellington played to ecstatic (white) audiences at the Cotton Club, "black Harlem had become a community in crisis, leading the nation in poverty, crime, overcrowding, unemployment, juvenile delinquency, malnutrition, and infant and maternal mortality." All this only got much worse during the Depression, "when Harlem was 'on the verge of starvation,' as a writer for the Federal Writers Project put it." The Depression "turned Harlem into a black ghetto, 80 percent of whose businesses were owned by whites."
Small wonder that anger and hopelessness were everywhere.
World War II jump-started New York's economy, and a few benefits trickled uptown to Harlem, but from the Depression to the 1990s times were hard, never more so than during "the fiscal crisis that engulfed New York City in the mid-1970s." It's easy to forgot that period today, with much of Manhattan a mecca for the uber-rich and Harlem enjoying a revival, but for a while back then it seemed as if New York was about to collapse, with Harlem a major contributing factor. If Harlem really does not merely revive but prosper, it will be a miracle in the eyes of many.
Over its long history, especially its history as capital of black America, Harlem has been both idealized and excoriated.
Gill does neither. He doesn't wax sentimental about the Harlem Renaissance, and he reports the community's shortcomings without hectoring. His "Harlem" is so long and so clogged with detail that at times it's a bit of a slog, but it's worth the effort.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE BLACK HISTORY OF THE WHITE HOUSE
THE BLACK HISTORY OF THE WHITE HOUSEClarence Lusane
City Lights
ISBN 978-0872865327
575 pages
$19.95
FAMILY OF FREEDOM: Presidents and African Americans in the White House Kenneth T. Walsh
Paradigm
ISBN 978-1594518331
266 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Patricia Sullivan
On January 20, 2009, nearly two million people crowded into Washington, D.C., to witness and celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama. The television audience in the tens of millions created a collective experience that stretched across the country and around the world. Barely 40 years after legally mandated segregation was abolished, a black man became president of the United States.
Two new books explore the long, complex relationship between African-Americans and the White House as a way to understand this momentous turning point. They start at the beginning -- when slaves laid the foundation of the new presidential residence in Washington -- and range across a broad, tumultuous stretch of history.
Clarence Lusane's boldly titled "The Black History of the White House" probes black interactions with the occupants of the White House through the experiences and accounts of slaves, servants, political strategists, entertainers, civil rights leaders and administrative officials. In the process, it recovers a critical and largely neglected dimension of America's past. Lusane, a professor of political science at American University, tells how racial ideas and practices at the highest levels of government continually undermined America's founding principles and how the endurance, resistance and struggles of black women and men sustained the promise of equality, creating the dynamic essential for racial change.
The book covers three periods: the slavery era; Emancipation to the 1960s; and post-Jim Crow to Obama. Drawing on the stories of a remarkable variety of individuals, it opens with Oney Maria Judge's dramatic escape from the temporary presidential residence in Philadelphia, and George Washington's aggressive effort to capture her. While it is well-known that eight presidents owned slaves while serving in office, this reality has powerful resonance here. Lusane describes the sights and sounds of the slave market that stretched along the Mall in clear view of the Capitol and the White House as late as the early 19th century.
During the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, African-Americans gained political access to the White House for the first time.
The relationship between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass offers insight into the evolution of Lincoln's leadership on the nation's most vexing issue. In a notable episode, Lusane describes how the 47-year-old Douglass "literally crashed through two police officers" attempting to bar him from the White House reception following Lincoln's second inaugural ceremony in 1865. He instructed the next layer of guards to tell the president that "Fred Douglass is at the door." Within minutes, the way was cleared. When Lincoln caught a glimpse of the abolitionist leader, he reportedly exclaimed: "Here comes my friend Douglass" and immediately engaged Douglass, anxious to know what he thought of the speech.
A month later Lincoln was dead, and it would be Andrew Johnson, the great accommodator of the defeated South, who set the tone of presidential racial policies for decades to come, with the brief exception of Ulysses S. Grant. The storm of southern protest that met Booker T. Washington's dinner at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, and Roosevelt's frantic pursuit of "damage-control," showed how tightly the line between the races was drawn.
But even during the most repressive decades of Jim Crow, Lusane reveals how black Americans asserted their citizenship in relationship to the office of the presidency. In 1898, Ida B. Wells led a delegation to the White House to protest the mob murder of the black postmaster of Lake City, S.C., demanding a federal investigation. President McKinley assured them he would look into it; nothing was done. Three years later, a black man, James Benjamin Parker, tackled McKinley's assassin, nearly saving the president's life and risking his own. Parker, who worked as a waiter, explained, "I do say that the life of the head of this country is worth more than an ordinary citizen and I should have caught the bullets in my body rather than the President should get them."
Lusane's treatment of the era from Franklin Roosevelt's administration through the Kennedy years is cursory. He describes it as a time when the White House became more open to black citizens and to racial concerns, but, with the exception of Harry Truman, suggests that presidential leadership continued to lag. Beyond a few "firsts" -- E. Frederic Morrow's appointment as an executive assistant to President Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy's recruitment of Abraham Bolden as the first black secret service officer assigned to the White House, the most notable expansion of the black presence at the White House appears to be on dinner lists and as featured artists for a variety of state occasions.
Yet from the 1930s to the 1960s, the White House was the primary focus of intensified black political engagement at the highest level of government. A host of strategists leveraged the growing power of northern black voters and the liberalizing force of New Deal initiatives to gain fuller access to the White House, press for black inclusion in the government, open up the Democratic Party, and lay the groundwork for the civil rights legislation of the mid-'60s. A few prominent examples: Mary McLeod Bethune organized the power of black officials within the Roosevelt Administration and became a major conduit to black voters; the NAACP's Walter White, a fixture in Washington, compelled Harry Truman to establish his famous commission on civil rights; and Louis Martin, a key advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was largely responsible for the appointment of an unprecedented number of African-Americans to positions in the federal government, mentoring a generation of black political leaders and party operatives. These and other men and women -- in tandem with civil rights protests on the ground -- were critical to the process that made the election of Barack Obama possible.
The book serves up a compelling account of the retreat from civil rights -- starting with the "southern strategy" of Richard Nixon and peaking with what Lusane calls Ronald Reagan's "anti-black agenda." There were, as the author notes, sharp differences in the racial attitudes and approaches of Republican and Democratic presidents in the closing decades of the 20th century.
Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both white Southerners, appointed more African-Americans to federal office than any president before them; five of Clinton's cabinet members were black. Yet Carter and Clinton's policies did little to challenge the direction set by the Republicans. Clinton signed crime and welfare legislation that yielded to a racially charged political environment.
In an interesting twist, Lusane stretches beyond White House insiders to provide a fascinating series of profiles of a dozen black men and women who have pursued presidential aspirations since the 1960s (starting with Dizzy Gillespie).
In "Family of Freedom," veteran White House correspondent Kenneth T. Walsh treads a narrow path. Organized chronologically around a succession of presidential administrations, his book provides a spare, uneven catalog of the racial policies and attitudes of individual presidents, paired with a description of the relationship between first families and African-Americans, particularly the black men and women who managed daily life in the White House. Walsh draws on the telling memoirs and recollections of the domestic staff as a window onto the personal behavior of presidents and first ladies. Comments by former presidents on their relationships with African-Americans in the White House are scarce, but revealing. At the end of his term, Lyndon Johnson publicly referred to Preston Bruce, who served five presidents, as "one of the dearest friends I have" and the one person, outside of his immediate family, who "has kept me going." George W. Bush told Walsh that he and Laura Bush felt "very close" to the White House residence staff. "They are family to us," he wrote, "and always will be." But Walsh provides little insight on how the policies of individual presidents and the actions of black people in the public arena informed the "arc of racial history" that, according to the author, culminated with the election of Barack Obama.
Together these books underscore the cumulative consequences of more than two centuries of slavery and racial segregation as evident in fractured politics, distorted historical memories, and persistent racial divisions and inequities. In matters of race, President Obama, like presidents before him, confronts stubborn realities and constraints. Effective presidential leadership in advancing a racially just and inclusive society will continue to depend on, as it always has, the dedicated efforts of skilled political strategists and organized movements making demands that cannot be ignored.
The symbolic removal of "whites only" from the White House has been a long time coming. What it "tells the nation and the world," as Clarence Lusane writes, is "that the struggle for equality, inclusion, and freedom has moved a bit further down the road."
Patricia Sullivan teaches history at the University of South Carolina and is the author of "Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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