The Social and Political Significance of Harlem in the 1920s

     One of the most significant elements in the black experience 
around the turn of the century was the continuing deterioration 
of their social and political positions in America. This was 
especially true in the rural South.  Many African Americans moved 
from the country to the industrial cities, both in the South and North. 
Obvious changes were evidenced by the growth of black ghettos in 
Northern areas.  The resurgence of black militancy in the face of an 
apparently unremitting chain of racism, violence, and injustice was 
fairly obvious.  But there was also a more subtle shift of attitude 
among blacks.  By the 1920s few black intellectuals still believed 
that the future of their race lay in the South at all.  They turned 
their attention northward and forcused their hope on the emerging 
black communities in northern cities.

     Northern blacks fared hardly better than their southern
counterparts.  Throughout the North, thearters, restaurants, and
hotels discriminated, often in violation of northern civil rights 
laws.  Many communities also established segregated school systems 
in spite of state law.  Blacks who attempted to challenge this 
growing segregation were so often unsuccessful that most chose 
simply to live with the situation.  As a result of the refusal of most 
unions to admit blacks to membership, they were excluded from 
entire industries and generally found employment in "the two 
worst categories in the occupational lexicon: "domestic and personal 
service" and "unskilled labor,

     The major social development that dominated the black
experience during the first quarter of the twentieth century 
was the vast migration which brought tens of thousands of blacks 
from the rural South into northern industrial cities.  The reason for
this sudden increase in demand for labor was that northern
industry, stimulated by the was contracts, found that the war also 
cut off its traditional source of industrial labor, the European
immigrant.  Many companies responded to this labor shortage by
actively recruiting southern blacks for the low-paying, unskilled
jobs that newly arrived immigrants had previously filled.

     One effect of the black migration was the emergence of Harlem
as the black metropolis and the social cultural center of black
America.  Before 1900, Harlem had been an extremely desirable 
upper-middle-class neighborhood of fine homes and apartment houses. 
The depressed housing market and the initiative of a number of black
realtors brought a steadily increasing flow of black residents into
West Harlem.  Harlem's transition, once it began, followed fairly
traditional patterns.  As soon as blacks started moving onto a
block, it became more and more difficult maintain property values,
and whites began to move out.  In 1920, black Harlem extended from
130th Street to 145th Street and from Fifth to Eighth Avenue, and
it contained approximately 73,000 blacks.

     By 1920, Harlem, by virtue of the sheer size of its black
population, had emerged as the capital of black America.  As in 
Chicago, certain opportunities arose in the music and entertainment 
industry which transcended low-level employment. Enter a young 
man named Fletcher Hamilton Henderson, a graduate of Atlanta 
University with a degree in chemistry.

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