Apollo Theater | 253 W. 125th St.
To start the walk by subway, take the A/B/C/D to 125th Street Station and walk east on W. 125th St. to the Apollo Theater (253 W. 125th Street), the first stop.By R. Ertug AltinayThis neoclassical theater was built in 1913-14. The Apollo first opened in 1914 as “Hurtig and Seamon’s New Burlesque Theater.” Like many theaters at the time, the venue upheld a strict whites-only policy both on stage and in the audience. In 1933, Hurtig and Seamon’s closed down during a campaign against burlesque.When the building reopened as “the 125th Street Apollo Theatre” in 1934, the format of the shows shifted from burlesque to variety revues, which African Americans were allowed to attend. The Apollo soon became one of the largest employers of Black performers and the pinnacle of venues on the “Chitlin' Circuit,” where it was safe and acceptable for African Americans to perform during the age of racial segregation.While the venue concentrated on African American acts, white artists such as Anita O’Day have also performed here. In 1957, the Apollo’s promoters booked a young Buddy Holly and his band, the Crickets, thinking they were Black. Comedians who performed in blackface were also booked at the Apollo until the 1940s, which disturbed many Black patrons.The Apollo is known by the slogan, “Where Stars are Born and Legends are Made.” Dionne Warwick once said: “To play the Apollo is the true proving ground. It was, and it still is, the true test of an artist.” Other “Apollo legends” who started their careers here include Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, the Jackson 5, and Lauryn Hill.In 1983, both the interior and exterior of the Apollo were designated New York City landmarks, and the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 1991, the State of New York purchased the venue. Today, the Apollo Theater draws an estimated 1.3 million visitors annually. Click here to watch Jamaican-Chinese-American slam poet Staceyann Chin performing "Homophobia" at the Apollo.
Hotel Theresa | 2082 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.
Walk east on W. 125th St. to the intersection of 125th and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd. Gather at the Adam Clayton Powell statue and look diagonally (southwest) to the former Hotel Theresa (2082 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.), now a huge white office building with a White Castle on the ground floor.By Henry CastilloThe Hotel Theresa opened at this intersection, known as the Great Black Way. Architects George and Edward Blum designed this white-painted apartment hotel, which spans one block and 13 stories with 300 rooms. The Theresa had an all-white clientele and staff for its first twenty-eight years. In 1940, the hotel began accepting all races and hiring Black staff and management. It became known as the "Waldorf of Harlem." The Hotel Theresa was partially racially integrated when most mid-Manhattan hotels wouldn’t accept Blacks. African Americans could perform at clubs, hotels and theaters, but they couldn’t sleep in hotel rooms or eat in hotel restaurants outside of the Hotel Theresa.In 1940, the following announcement appeared in the New York Age, the most influential Black newspaper from 1897 to 1953:Harlem Hotel Seeks Negro Trade; Picks Manager: The Hotel Theresa at Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, which catered to white patronage for several years, has changed its policy as of March 20 and will cater to both races, under Negro management with a Negro staff, according to an announcement by Richard Thomas, publicity manager of the hotel. In carrying out its new policy for the accommodation of Negroes and whites, the Gresham Management Company, operators of the Theresa, appointed Walter Scott as the hotel’s manager. Extensive renovations and improvements of the service and facilities of the hotel have been undertaken. A staff of 80 persons has been employed.When famous Black music stars like Josephine Baker, Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, and Nat King Cole went to Harlem for a night’s sleep, the Hotel Theresa’s rooms, bars, and swanky shops signaled that they had finally arrived-- at least in Harlem.In 1941, heavyweight champion Joe Louis attracted 10,000 fans when he stayed at the Theresa after a victory at the Polo Grounds. Soon afterwards, John H. Johnson was a guest at the Theresa when he started a new pocket-sized magazine called the Negro Digest. And after splitting with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X rented offices at the hotel for his Organization of Afro-American Unity.The hotel became a destination for political radicals when Fidel Castro and his staff came to New York in 1960 to address the United Nations. They first checked in to the Shelburne Hotel in Midtown, but they moved to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem when the Shelburne demanded $10,000 for alleged damage that included cooking chickens in their rooms. The Theresa benefited from worldwide publicity when Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union, Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India, and Malcolm X all visited Castro there. Castro’s entourage rented eighty rooms for a total of $800 per day.At the end of 1960, John F. Kennedy made a presidential campaign stop at the hotel with Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (whose statue stands in front of the state building on West 125th Street). “I am delighted to come and visit,” said Kennedy. “Behind the fact of Castro coming to this hotel, Khrushchev coming to Castro, there is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil. I am delighted to come to Harlem, and I think the whole world should come here, and the whole world should recognize that we all live right next to each other, whether here in Harlem or on the other side of globe.”In 1971, the hotel was converted to an office building named Theresa Towers. New York City declared it a landmark in 1993.
The Studio Museum | 144 W. 125th St.
To reach the original and permanent location of the Studio Museum (144 West 125th Street), cross W. 125th St. and then continue heading east halfway down the block. Visit the museum if it's open. However, beware that this location is undergoing major construction through 2021. Their temporary space can be visited at 429 W. 127th St. Go to studiomuseum.org for more details.By Leticia Robles-MorenoThe Studio Museum in Harlem is the nexus for artists of African descent from around the world and artwork inspired and influenced by Black culture. Between 2019 and 2021, the museum is getting a $175 million facelift and will host a temporary space on nearby West 127th Street.* The Studio Museum’s Artist-in-Residence program, which gives the “Studio” to the Studio Museum’s name, was one of the Museum’s founding initiatives. The program has supported more than one hundred emerging artists of African or Latino descent, many of whom have gone on to establish renowned careers. Their work encompasses aesthetic and political issues such as Black identity, cultural heritage and clashes, gender and sexuality, among other topics. The material that they employ in their art – objects, paintings, or the bare body – invokes the materiality of their social concerns. One way to grasp the relevance of the Studio Museum to art, culture, and politics today is to hear from some of its most distinguished alumni:Chakaia Booker has been working with rubber tires since the early 1990s. The black tires symbolize the strength of Black identity while colorful nuances are meant to evoke the complexities of race. According to Booker, "salvaging such defiant beauty from scraps of resilient black, rubber [provides] a compelling metaphor of African American survival in the modern world." Julie Mehretu tackles broader sociopolitical issues. According to her, “Before the Bush Administration and September 11, there was this underlying feeling that the world was progressing in a particular way, and different cities were developing and morphing into this kind of unified pseudo-capitalist dream... That false perspective and weird hope... was crushed in the last few years. The way the U.S. has responded, especially with the war in Iraq, has put the world into a different place. Right now it just feels like this big knot of all these different tendencies. It’s coming out in my drawings a lot; they look like these nests or gnarled webs. Space is deflated and conflated. I’m still trying to understand it myself.” One of her largest works is a wall of the Goldman Sachs office in lower Manhattan. In Wangechi Mutu’s view, “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.” Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional African crafts, Mutu engages in her own form of storytelling; her works document the contemporary myth-making of endangered cultural heritage. David Hammons blurs notions of public and private spaces as well as the value of commodities. He says: “I like doing stuff better on the street because the art becomes just one of the objects that's in the path of your everyday existence. It's what you move through, and it doesn't have any seniority over anything else. Those pieces were all about making sure that the Black viewer had a reflection of himself in the work. White viewers have to look at someone else's culture in those pieces and see very little of themselves in it.”Black poet laureate Claudia Rankine chose his sculpture, Fresh Hell, as the cover for her book, Citizen, long before Trayvon Martin's death made the hoodie a national symbol for African American men's defamatory stereotyping.Rankine's prose poetry also incorporates Mutu's art. Here's an emblematic quote from her book:Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler's remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.For the most updated list of names of Black youths who have been killed with impunity, flip to the back pages of the latest edition of Citizen at your local bookstore. Graywolf Press updates the list of victims in the epliogue of each new edition.*Editorial addition made by Nicole Marie Gervasio in August 2019.
Langston Hughes' Home | 20 E. 127th St.
Walk east on W. 125th St. towards Lenox Ave. Turn left on 5th Ave, then make a right onto E. 127th St. Walk partway down the block to Langston Hughes’ brownstone (20 E. 127th St.).By Nicole GervasioLangston Hughes, an African American poet, novelist, and activist, lived in this brownstone from 1948 until his death in 1967. In his poetry, Hughes captures the experience of surviving under the pressure of multiply overlapping oppressions in the U.S. On his father’s side, his great-grandmothers had been slaves, and his great-grandfathers were Southern white slave-owners. A light-skinned Black man, he wrote about passing as white. Believed to be bisexual like his confidante, Zora Neale Hurston, he also explored the social pressure to pass as straight in order to gain acceptance in society.His six-line poem, “To F.S.,” is thought to be addressed to Ferdinand Smith, a Jamaican sailor with whom he fell in love and kept in touch for thirty years:I loved my friend.He went away from me.There is nothing more to say.The poem ends,Soft as it began, —I loved my friend.While Hurston went to Barnard, Hughes dropped out of Columbia after one brief year, unable to endure the racial discrimination rampant at our university in that era. His poetry is remarkable for its historical prescience. Now we’ll read his poem, “Kids Who Die,” to commemorate the young victims of racially motivated murder who have occupied U.S. headlines in recent years.This is for the kids who die,Black and white,For kids will die certainly.The old and rich will live on awhile,As always,Eating blood and gold,Letting kids die.Kids will die in the swamps of MississippiOrganizing sharecroppersKids will die in the streets of ChicagoOrganizing workersKids will die in the orange groves of CaliforniaTelling others to get togetherWhites and Filipinos,Negroes and Mexicans,All kinds of kids will dieWho don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentmentAnd a lousy peace.Of course, the wise and the learnedWho pen editorials in the papers,And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their namesWhite and black,Who make surveys and write booksWill live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,And the sleazy courts,And the bribe-reaching police,And the blood-loving generals,And the money-loving preachersWill all raise their hands against the kids who die,Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bulletsTo frighten the people—For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—And the old and rich don’t want the peopleTo taste the iron of the kids who die,Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power,To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get togetherListen, kids who die—Maybe, now, there will be no monument for youExcept in our heartsMaybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swampOr a prison grave, or the potter’s field,Or the rivers where you’re drowned like LeibknechtBut the day will come—You are sure yourselves that it is coming—When the marching feet of the massesWill raise for you a living monument of love,And joy, and laughter,And black hands and white hands clasped as one,And a song that reaches the sky—The song of the life triumphantThrough the kids who die.The brief list of names included in this memory walk cannot begin to cover all the new cases of unarmed Black Americans killed by police as well as white supremacists. But in 2015, when this walk was first created, we strove to remember many recent deaths that had spurred the Black Lives Matter movement. Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African American, was racially profiled and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood vigilante, in Florida in 2012; Zimmerman was acquitted of both murder and a hate crime.Another police officer, Darren Wilson, shot Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old African American, twelve times for stealing a box of cigarillos in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014; Wilson was also acquitted for murder.In 2015, in Baltimore, Maryland, police used such excessive force when arresting and transporting Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, that he lapsed into a coma from fatal spinal injuries within an hour and a half of his arrest. The officer who mishandled his arrest and drove the van was acquitted in June 2016 of both manslaughter and second-degree murder charges.In June 2015, the white supremacist Dylann Roof, shot nine parishioners attending church in Charleston, South Carolina. One of the victims, twenty-six-year-old Tywanza Sanders, was a poet himself; he died protecting his mother. Roof is only twenty-three years old himself; in April 2017, he was sentenced to nine consecutive life sentences, three consecutive 30-year sentences, and the death penalty after pleading guilty to nine counts of murder, three attempted murder charges, and one unlawful weapons charge. The last casualty added to this list by July 2015 was Sandra Bland, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman in a small town in Texas who died in her jail cell; the circumstances of her purported suicide were never clarified. Her arrest started with a petty traffic ticket, which she reacted to with exasperation. “You asked me what was wrong, and I told you,” she told the officer. He then escalated their altercation by pulling her out of her car. He refused to hear her voice, no matter how angrily it told the truth, shamed him for being “fucking scared of a female,” or screamed as he subdued her in the name of the “lawful order” he claimed to represent. The full police tape of her arrest has been made public. On June 19, 2017, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law the Sandra Bland Act, which makes new mental health provisions for subjects in custody but does not curb law enforcement and racial profiling.This brownstone, which housed the poet who accounted for and foresaw further white-on-Black violence, is now occupied by the I, Too Arts Collective, a nonprofit offering free literary arts programming. Previously, the house had gone on the market twice for $1 million, in a neighborhood where the average household income is $39,000. Click here to listen to Langston Hughes read his poem, "I, Too," the namesake for the neighborhood arts collective now based in his former home.
Alexander Gumby's Salon & Book Studio | 2144 5th Ave.
Return to the corner of E. 127th St. and 5th Ave. Cross the street to the west side of 5th Ave. Walk north on 5th Ave., passing W. 131st St., to the brownstone with rainbow bricks. This building once housed Gumby’s Salon and Book Studio (2144 5th Ave.).By R. Ertug Altinay and Nicole GervasioLevi Sandy Alexander Gumby, beloved by friends as “the Great God Gumby,” was the openly gay African American proprietor of the artists’ salon once housed within these rainbow bricks. Originally from Maryland, Gumby moved to New York City and worked as a butler, a bellhop, a postal worker, and a waiter at Columbia University.In the early 1920s, with the support of Charles W. Newman, a wealthy stockbroker who was his friend and sometimes lover, he opened the Gumby Book Studio. The studio became a hub for artists, intellectuals and the queer community. Gumby called his studio “the first unpremeditated interracial movement in Harlem.”Gumby meticulously created 300 scrapbooks that were at once both cosmopolitan and quotidian. His scrapbooks reflected his diverse interests, which ranged from lynching to baseball to Josephine Baker. Like other African American archivists and historians of the period, he did not aim to uncover a distinct African American history. Rather, he desired to reveal an American and world history that included people of African descent.The constellation of stories assembled in his Harlem scrapbook refuses to give up on a utopian possibility of interracial community in Harlem. The scrapbook opens with a 1922 New York Times article about plans for a new subway system that would connect Harlem to downtown Manhattan. The news clipping is implicitly racist; it suggests that a subway line to “the Black belt of Harlem” would be a waste of time. Gumby challenges this racism by juxtaposing it against a poem by Robert Schlick, which sees Harlem as a transformative intersection where, in his words, “East and Hudson sift their waters.”In subsequent clippings about civil rights marches, community-building groups like the Elks Lodge, and social organizing, Gumby continues counteracting bigoted news coverage with local reports about Harlem’s thriving community. By 1929 in this scrapbook, Harlem transforms into a mixed-race site of play in which, according to one reporter “those who formerly patronized midtown resorts are now spending their nights mingling with colored folks.” Here is a lengthier excerpt from Frank Dolan’s clipping:Here occurs, indeed, a singular intermingling of the races.Men of the mysterious lands of the Far East—Hindus, Japanese, Chinese, Malays—rub elbows on the dance floor with West Indian and colored folk from all parts of America.The Bamboo is the most Democratic club of the lot, in that a man of any color may walk in accompanied by a woman of any other color—or no woman at all.[…] Such are the nine night clubs of the colored colony, the magnets that have stolen the suckers away from Broadway.The image of the dance floor manifests the multicultural dream of the melting pot. The dance itself is intimate—flesh touches, elbows rub. The fact that a man might walk in with “no woman at all” suggests that a gay man might not need to affirm his heterosexuality at the door. “The colored colony,” sequestered as it is, holds a “magnetic” allure for Black and white men alike who might prefer to remain in the shadows of Broadway's bright lights. Through his scrapbooks, Gumby was thus able to play with innuendos and social codes in the media to assert a new narrative for Harlem.With the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Newman lost his wealth, and Gumby had to give up the studio. In 1950, Gumby donated his scrapbook collection to Columbia University, where they are still housed. Although his archive is protected, the gathering place he provided in this building has long been lost to the gentrification that threatens many informal memory sites in this neighborhood. Click here to view an online exhibition of Gumby's scrapbooks hosted by Columbia University's Butler Library.
Utopia Children's House | 170 W. 130th St.
From 5th Ave., make a right onto W. 131st St. Turn left at Lenox/Malcolm X Blvd. and then right onto W. 130th St. Continue walking until you get to the building that once housed Utopia Children’s House (170 W 130th St.), which will be on the south side of W. 130th St.By Leticia Robles-MorenoUtopia Children’s House was a safe place where African American parents, especially single mothers, could keep their children busy and happy off the street while they were at work. It was also a creative space where children could learn arts and crafts while developing a sense of self-worth, belonging, and community. The well-known painter Jacob Lawrence started his career as a child at Utopia. Utopia Children’s House provides a counter-narrative to the history of violence and racially motivated crimes that have taken the lives of many African American youth. In today’s world, a bag of Skittles and an iced tea can be mistaken for weapons, as they were in the case of Michael Brown, who was racially profiled and murdered by a police officer because of prejudices against Black youth. In contrast, Utopia Children’s House put paintbrushes in the hands of young children in need of a better life. This is the place where hope rose and where life could be celebrated. Here residents could answer the African American poet Lucille Clifton’s invitation, “Won’t you celebrate with me?”:won't you celebrate with mewhat i have shaped intoa kind of life? i had no model.born in babylonboth nonwhite and womanwhat did i see to be except myself?i made it uphere on this bridge betweenstarshine and clay,my one hand holding tightmy other hand; come celebratewith me that everydaysomething has tried to kill meand has failed.Recently, the Black Trans Media Project updated this poem with a musical installation, meant to commemorate the life of Islan Nettles, a transwoman of color who was murdered as the result of a hate crime in Harlem in 2013.*As we will see in our walk, hope and hopelessness are ingrained in the everyday life of Harlem – a place where children’s games offer glimpses of a future that can be promising or terrifying, and always challenging. Maya Angelou, another African American poet, depicted this struggle in “Harlem Hopscotch.” The work of Utopia Children’s House made the difference so that winning and losing the game of life wouldn’t depend on the flip of a coin or the chances of a children’s game. Here’s her poem.One foot down, then hop! It's hot. Good things for the ones that's got.Another jump, now to the left. Everybody for hisself.In the air, now both feet down. Since you black, don't stick around.Food is gone, the rent is due, Curse and cry and then jump two.All the people out of work, Hold for three, then twist and jerk.Cross the line, they count you out. That's what hopping's all about.Both feet flat, the game is done.They think I lost. I think I won.Against the odds of an uncertain future, we must remember that the name “Utopia” wants to transport us to a better Harlem and better worlds. Utopia Children’s House invited us to imagine the promise of hope. In the words of the late queer-of-color theorist José Esteban Muñoz: “How does one stage utopia? [...] Utopia is not prescriptive; it renders potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema. It is productive to think about utopia as flux, a temporal disorganization, as a moment when the here and the now is transcended by a then and a there that could be and indeed should be.”Click here to view the official music video for Maya Angelou's "Harlem Hopscotch" produced by the Oprah Winfrey Network.*Editorial addition made by Nicole Marie Gervasio in July 2017.
Clam House, Connie's Inn, and the Ubangi Club | W. 132nd St. & Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.
Continue walking west on W. 130th St. until you reach Adam Clayton Powell at the next block. Turn right onto Adam Clayton Powell. Continue heading north until you reach the construction site and scaffolding at the intersection of W. 132nd St. and Adam Clayton Powell. This site is where Connie’s Inn, the Clam House, and the Ubangi Club once stood, adjacent to the demolished Lafayette Theater.By Alyssa GreeneThe Clam House, Connie’s Inn, and the Ubangi Club all served as vibrant establishments in Harlem’s nightlife and queer history. All speakeasies during Prohibition, they stood adjacent to the Lafayette Theater; all have since been torn down.Prohibition was a federal ban on the sale, production, and importation of alcohol in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933. Speakeasies were incredibly profitable establishments that sold alcohol illegally. During Prohibition, speakeasies flourished. It is estimated that there were between 30,000 and 100,000 in New York City alone.Nightclubs like Connie’s Inn, founded by German immigrant Conrad Immerman in 1923, showcased jazz legends like Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters. Although the club featured African American artists, it only allowed white patrons. Immerman and his brothers eventually moved Connie’s downtown. In 1934, the Harlem site reopened as the Ubangi Club. In the blues scene of the 1920s, people could more openly express their queerness. In Harlem, queer artists still faced harassment from both civilians and police, but overall, they experienced a degree of freedom extremely rare in the U.S. at that time. Singers such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Gladys Bentley sang about same-sex affairs even though it was possible to be criminally prosecuted for such behavior. Bentley, an openly lesbian singer, pianist, and performer, appeared at the Clam House and the Ubangi Club. When she heard that the Clam House needed a male pianist, she began dressing in men’s clothing. Her act, performed in a tuxedo, took off: while flirting openly with women in the crowd, she sang about “sissies” and “bulldaggers” and affairs she’d had with women. In 1931, she married a white woman in a public ceremony in New Jersey; little is known about the woman she married. Later in life, as persecution of LGBTQ people intensified in the McCarthy Era, Bentley legally married a man and renounced her lesbianism.In 2013, the building that housed the Ubangi Club was demolished. Like many other places important to the Harlem Renaissance, the building was never made a historic landmark, and so, efforts to preserve it in the face of urban development were far more difficult. Fewer sites are protected in Harlem than in other parts of Manhattan: as of 2015, only 3.6 percent of Central Harlem is designated for historical protection in comparison to 26 percent of the Upper West Side and 45 percent of the West Village.*Editorial addition made by Nicole Marie Gervasio in July 2017:Ma Rainey, “Prove it on Me Blues”I went out last night, had a great big fightEverything seemed to go wrongWhen I looked up, to my surpriseThe gal I was with was goneFolks say I'm crookedI don't know where she took itI want the whole world to knowI went out last night with a crowd of my friendsThey must've been women, 'cause I don't like no menIt's true I wear a collar and a tie,I like to watch the women as they pass byThey say I do it, ain't nobody caught meThey sure gotta prove it on meClick here to listen to Ma Rainey's song.
Speakers' Corner | Southwest Corner of W. 135th St. & Lenox/Malcolm X Blvd.
Head north on Adam Clayton Powell. Turn right onto W. 135th St. and walk to Speakers’ Corner (W. 125th St. & Lenox/Malcolm X Blvd.).By Andrea CrowMany cities around the world have their own Speakers' Corners where orators gather to lecture passersby. Most often, socialist leaders established and perpetuated these spaces; this Speakers’ Corner on the corner of 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard is no different.From the 1910s to the 1960s, this corner was a hub of public intellectual and cultural life. Speakers gathered massive crowds around lectures on subjects from economics and philosophy to literature and the arts. They even discussed seemingly apolitical subjects like astronomy -- which, of course, was highly political in a country that denies full educational access to its Black community.This prominent Speakers’ Corner is only one of the dozens that formerly covered this area. On summer evenings, speakers, locals, and visitors alike would turn out in large numbers on Speakers’ Corner to enjoy the cooler air. Speakers took advantage of these informal community gatherings to spread ideas that might be considered too politically radical in more conservative and regulated cultural institutions like the church.Jamaican political leader and pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey was one of the most famous speakers on this corner. In response to the 1917 East St. Louis riots, an outbreak of extreme racialized violence spurred by unjust labor practices, Garvey delivered a speech just a few streets down from this location. He called on listeners to recognize that it was “time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.” In response to the idea that the U.S. is a democracy, he said, “the whole thing, my friends, is a bloody farce [...the fact] that the police and soldiers did nothing to stem the murder thirst of the mob is conclusive proof of conspiracy on the part of the civil authorities to condone the[se] acts [of violence against black America].” Today’s Black Lives Matter movement echoes many of these very same sentiments.The corner now bears the name of Malcolm X, who spoke here many times throughout the 1960s. Because of its proximity to many memory sites for civil rights activists, Speakers’ Corner has remained a key location for Black political movements. Much more recently, this stretch of West 136th Street was also renamed for Madam C.J. Walker, the first self-made woman millionaire in the U.S., and her daughter, A'Lelia Walker, who inherited her mother's extensive beauty empire in addition to hosting artists' salons during the Harlem Renaissance.*Editorial addition made by Nicole Marie Gervasio in August 2019.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture | 515 Malcolm X Blvd.
Follow the wall to the entrance of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (515 Malcolm X Blvd.) on Lenox/Malcolm X Blvd. Pause to view the Schomburg's current exhibitions and the resting place of Langston Hughes' ashes in the library atrium.By Nicole GervasioWhen the New York Public Library erected a building on West 135th Street in 1905, the new branch was not intended to become the world’s premier research center for Black culture.Ernestine Rose, a white librarian from rural Long Island, steered the branch’s attention towards preserving Black culture. In 1920, she took it upon herself to racially integrate the library’s staff. She and the first African American librarians hired by the NYPL-- three women, Catherine Latimer, Roberta Bosely, and Sadie Peterson Delaney, the founder of bibliotherapy-- collaborated to showcase African American arts and literacy within Harlem. By 1924, Rose began acquiring rare books and collections with Harlem Renaissance luminaries like James Weldon Johnson, Hubert Henry Harrison, and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.In Rose’s view, the separate-but-equal policy that segregated library staffs and patrons was detrimental to American cultural progress because segregation kept brilliant artists and writers of different races from interacting with each other. In May 1923, Rose said in Harlem’s historic Black newspaper, The New York Amsterdam News: “[i]t is by the contact of individual with individual, the acquaintance of one person with another, that all prejudice, personal or social, breaks down. I should accept branch libraries for the colored Negro schools, and specialized Negro institutions, only in case they do not limit within their own narrow walks the opportunity of the colored worker or the colored student to reach out into the whole wide field of human work and human knowledge.”In her book, The Public Library in American Life, published by Columbia University in 1954, Rose presented the Schomburg Library in Harlem as exemplifying the special potential libraries have for cultivating art and literature in marginalized communities: “Librarians,” she said, “still differ considerably in their attitude toward taking so lively a part in the so-called social field. Many say that the library should remain a library pure and simple and not try to become a social settlement. Others insist that libraries must learn new ways of implementing their service to fill modern social needs and are ready to defend any type of activity from this point of view.”A bibliophile of Puerto Rican and African American descent, Arturo Schomburg donated 5,000 works to Rose that he had collected around the world over thirty-five years. He believed archives had the power to reevaluate history. He said: “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. History must restore what slavery took away.” The library was renamed for him in 1972 and relocated to a new building, today’s Schomburg Center, in 1980. Today the Schomburg Center remains an unsurpassed repository of 10 million objects venerating Black literature, arts, politics, culture, and history. The library also continues its tradition of fostering social change in Harlem; one of its most recent endeavors, the “In the Life Archive,” is collecting oral histories from queer senior citizens of color about the discrimination they have faced in their families. The queer poet Langston Hughes' ashes are also interred under a commemorative mosaic at the entrance of the library's auditorium.
Renaissance Ballroom | 2351 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.
Upon leaving the museum, turn left onto Lenox/Malcolm X and head north, past the Schomburg. Make a left onto W. 138th St. and then another left onto Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. Stop at the new luxury condominium complex called The Rennie (2351 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.). This was where the remains of the Renaissance Ballroom stood until April 2015.By Henry CastilloMany people, even locals, are not aware that the old Renaissance Ballroom complex began as just a "theatre." This event was an important breakthrough. Prior to the Renaissance Theatre, nicknamed “the Rennie,” Black people weren’t permitted to sit in the orchestra of most movie houses, even home in Harlem. While whites sat below, Black patrons had to use the balcony. This elevated seating area became known as "heaven" for Black Americans. That historic structure ushered in a decade-long period of African American cultural and artistic flourishing. At the time, it was known as the New Negro Movement. Now, we know it as the Harlem Renaissance. While many mistakenly believe that the building, the Renaissance Theater, was named after the era, it was in fact the other way around.African Americans moved to Harlem in droves but had few opportunities to erect new buildings. A partnership of African American businessmen in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which urged African Americans to support Black-owned businesses, collaborated in building the Rennie. Architect Harry Creighton Ingalls completed the theater in 1922 and the ballroom atop a billiard parlor, shops, and a Chinese restaurant two years later. The Rennie’s builders were Caribbean immigrants. William H. Roach, an Antiguan, ran a real estate business. His partners-- Cleophus Charity, the president of the Rennie, and Joseph H. Sweeney, the treasurer-- were from Montserrat.By the time Harlem became regarded as a Black Mecca in the 1920s, the Rennie fulfilled demand for mass meetings, sporting events and organized dances. As similar low-rise entertainment complexes arose all over America, the Rennie made Harlem famous. It also hosted innumerable dances sponsored by local groups that played an ubiquitous role in African American social life into the 1950s. America’s first African American professional basketball team, the Renns, were virtually undefeated for 40 years in matches against other famous African American teams as well as much rarer contests with white teams.How disillusioning must it have been for the Black creators of this wonderful building to see the Rennie foreclosed during the Great Depression and their dream taken over by whites? With the onset of the Depression in the early 1930s, the new owners replaced Black workers, projectionists and ticket-takers with an all-white staff. Although the Rennie continued to be a venue for jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, something definitely had been lost. For Joseph H. Sweeney, the Rennie’s treasurer, this loss was so great that within weeks of losing control of the Rennie, he locked himself into his home and turned on his gas stove. His funeral, presided over by the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., was held at the Abyssinian Baptist Church nearby.By the 1990s, the Rennie had so deteriorated that it was used as a setting for Spike Lee’s crack den from hell in the movie Jungle Fever. But just before this occurred, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission had identified it as one of only 25 buildings that should represent their “opening salvo” in ensuring Harlem landmarks protection equal to that of the rest of Manhattan.Although the commission agreed to landmark the complex in 1991, the process never finished. Until very recently, the abandoned complex sat across from the historic Strivers Row, where townhouses now sell for upwards of $2 million. The Abyssinian Development Corporation ultimately won the fight over the Rennie. They felt that landmarking it would create delays in their plans for a 13-story steel and glass luxury apartment tower complex above the casino. In April 2015, during the making of this memory walk, they demolished the Rennie’s last remains. *In its place has been erected a luxury condominium complex of the same name; purchase prices for its 134 units range from $588,000 (for a studio) to $1.5 million (for three bedrooms) in a neighborhood where the poverty rate was 23.5% in 2017 and the median household income was $49,995, about 19% less than citywide median household income ($62,040).Click here to watch the official trailer for Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, possibly the only remaining footage of the Rennie.*Editorial addition made by Nicole Marie Gervasio in August 2019.
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters | 239 W. 136th St.
Turn left, heading south on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. Make an immediate right onto W. 136th St. Keep walking until you encounter the apartment building that once housed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (239 W. 136th St.).By Alyssa GreeneThe Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the first African American-led labor union to receive a charter from the American Federation of Labor (AFL).In the 1880s, the Pullman Company established sleeping cars and employed African Americans to serve as porters and maids to a mostly white clientele. Although comparatively better off than workers in other trades, porters and maids worked long hours for little pay and lacked job security; they also had to pay for their own food, lodgings, and uniforms.Although service was perhaps the most visible aspect of a porter’s job, his primary responsibility was to ensure safety in the car. The porter had to know how to operate every mechanical and electrical feature of the Pullman car; sometimes, he was injured in the process.The maids worked as white women’s attendants and domestic workers. They were responsible for keeping the interior spotless and helping female passengers fix their hair and mend clothing, among other things. Although many tasks were required for the job, the Pullman Company instituted race-based wage discrimination, which automatically classified African Americans as unskilled laborers. Porters thus had no chance of being promoted to conductor despite often performing the same duties. In addition, porters and maids faced countless indignities from passengers as well as employers.At the beginning of the twentieth century, porters tried to organize politically but faced fierce opposition. In 1925, A. Philip Randolph, a Black labor activist, founded the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (abbreviated BSCP, despite the inclusion of the maids).The BSCP had to fight for recognition on three fronts: against the Pullman Company, the American Federation of Labor, and popular opinion within the Black community, which saw the Pullman Company as providing good jobs. As a labor organizer, Randolph emphasized the paternalistic nature of the Pullman Company’s relationship to its Black employees.While the AFL did not technically exclude Black members, many of its affiliates did. Since racism was prevalent within the labor movement, many members of the Black community were justifiably skeptical of Randolph’s politics. Nevertheless, Randolph worked tirelessly to build rank-and-file support. In 1928, the BSCP was able to leverage the threat of a strike and bring the Pullman Company to the bargaining table.Once President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal brought about a shift in the political climate as well as labor law, the Pullman Company officially recognized the BSCP in 1935. That same year, the AFL granted the BSCP a charter. In 1937, the BSCP won its first contract. Randolph utilized his access to the American Federation of Labor’s meetings to advocate for black workers’ equality with white workers and oppose racism within the labor movement.The BSCP helped build networks between Black communities across the country, and members went on to play a significant role in the Civil Rights Movement. For example, E.D. Nixon, president of the BCSP chapter in Montgomery, Alabama for many years, played a crucial role in organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955.*Editorial addition made by Nicole Marie Gervasio in July 2016:The continued salience of A. Philip Randolph’s astute words in his famous March on Washington speech in 1963 have an eerie prescience for ongoing debates about racial profiling, joblessness, and welfare states today. Speaking of the civil rights movement, he said:We are not a pressure group, we are not an organization or a group of organizations, we are not a mob. We are the advanced guard of a massive, moral revolution for jobs and freedom. This revolution reverberates throughout the land touching every city, every town, every village where black men are segregated, oppressed and exploited. But this civil rights revolution is not confined to the Negro, nor is it confined to civil rights for our white allies know that they cannot be free while we are not.[...]We want a free, democratic society dedicated to the political, economic and social advancement of man along moral lines. Now we know that real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions. For one thing we must destroy the notion that Mrs. Murphy’s property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin.The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality. It falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values, because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property. It falls to us to demand new forms of social planning, to create full employment, and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits—for we are the worst victims of unemployment. Negroes are in the forefront of today’s movement for social and racial justice, because we know we cannot expect the realization of our aspirations through the same old anti-democratic social institutions and philosophies that have all along frustrated our aspirations.[...]Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy.
267 House | 267 W. 136th St.
Keep walking east on W. 136th St. until reaching the parking lot and rebuilt townhouse where 267 House (267 W 136th St.) once stood, which will be just before the intersection of W. 136th St. and Frederick Douglass Blvd.By Andrea CrowHere you can see the parking lot and townhouse where the artists’ community at 267 West 136th Street formerly stood. During the 1920s, Iolanthe Sidney, an African American patron of the arts, owned the boarding house that once stood here. She allowed Black artists to live there free of charge so that they could devote more time to their art.The major figures of the Harlem Renaissance gathered here. They took up residence in this artists’ community to exchange ideas, work on projects with their colleagues, and strengthen the interpersonal ties that made the era so revolutionary.Residents and friends of 267 House published Fire!!, a literary journal devoted to young Black artists. Anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, who at this time was also the only Black student at Barnard College, joined poet Langston Hughes, writer and painter Richard Bruce Nugent, and editor Wallace Thurman in producing this journal. The journal contained essays, fiction, and poetry as well as visual art by the mural painter Aaron Douglas. In turn, Nugent’s homoerotic murals on the unusual red and black walls of 267 House inspired Douglas’s art.Their art contended with a major barrier that galvanized 267 House artists and their publication: because Fire!! published frank sexual content, it was controversial within circles that argued for respectability in African American art.Nugent’s queer stream-of-consciousness story, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” epitomizes the journal’s aims to disrupt aspirations towards acceptability. Nineteen-year-old Alex walks around Harlem reflecting on his decision to become an artist. He contemplates his self-doubt in the face of his family’s skepticism and their annoyance with his decision to prioritize this path over a respectable career. He writes:[N]o mothers aren’t jealous of their sons...they are proud of them...why then...when these friends accepted and liked him...no matter how he dressed...why did mother ask...and you went looking like that...Langston was a fine fellow...he knew there was something in Alex...and so did Rene and Borgia...and Zora and Clement and Miguel...and...and...and all of them...if he went to see mother she would ask...how do you feel Alex with nothing in your pockets...I don’t see how you can be satisfied...Really you’re a mystery to me...and who you take after...I’m sure I don’t know...none of my brothers were lazy and shiftless...I can never remember the time when they weren’t sending money home and when your father was your age he was supporting a family...where you get your nerve I don’t know...just because you’ve tried to write one or two little poems and stories that no one understands...you seem to think the world owes you a living...you should see by now how much is thought of them...you can’t sell anything...and you won’t do anything to make money...wake up Alex...I don’t know what will become of you........It was hard to believe in one’s self after that...did Wilde’s parents or Shelley’s or Goya’s talk to them like that...but it was depressing to think in that vein...Alex stretched and yawned.Alex’s musings are intertwined with his thoughts on the two people with whom he has fallen in love: a woman named Melva and a man named Beauty. In the background of his consciousness, he thinks through the ways in which the vibrant yet tenuous social circles in the Harlem Renaissance make it possible to follow his alternate destiny.As Nugent’s fiction intimates, writers and artists worked together to support a thriving cultural life. At 267 House, even purely social events became opportunities to foster community in the face of extreme prejudice. One concrete example was the “rent party,” commonly held in boarding houses throughout this era. Guests would show up to a friend’s party with money to help him or her pay rent that month. Grassroots interventions like rent parties became increasingly necessary as predominantly white landlords in Harlem doubled or even tripled rents for Black tenants.This practice of driving up prices-- and consequently driving out the Black community-- is still a major force shaping Harlem today. The universities that sponsored the creation of this memory walk-- Columbia and New York University-- remain two of the biggest and most rapidly expanding landowners in New York. Thank you for joining us on our walk through Harlem. We hope you enjoyed it and invite you to share it with your friends and colleagues. If you are interested in learning more about Women Mobilizing Memory or related events at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, please, check out our new anthology and sign up on our mailing list at the bottom of this page.For your departure, the closest subway station at the close of the walk is the B/C subway station at W. 135th St. and Edgecombe Ave./St. Nicholas Ave., near the east end of St. Nicholas Park.
