Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America

521 Pages·2016·5.74 MB·English

by  Jonathan Gill

HARLEM
HARLEM
THE FOUR HUNDRED YEAR HISTORY
FROM DUTCH VILLAGE TO
CAPITAL OF BLACK AMERICA
JONATHAN GILL
Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Gill All rights reserved. No part of this book may
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[email protected] Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9594-4
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
For Eveline Ledeboer
Eisch alles, geef alles
CONTENTS
1. Unrighteous Beginnings
From Muscoota to Nieuw Haarlem, 1609–1664
2. Strange Bedfellows
British Harlem, 1664–1781
3. Sweet Asylum
Founding an American Harlem, 1781–1811
4. The Future Is Uptown, 1811–1863
5. The Flash Age, 1863–1898
6. Nostra Harlem, Undzere Harlem
The Age of Immigration
7. “To Race with the World”
The New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance
8. “The Kingdom of Culture”
Harlem’s Renaissance Comes of Age
9. “Moon Over Harlem”
The Great Depression Uptown, 1929–1943
10. “Tempus Fugue-It”
Harlem in the Civil Rights Era, 1943–1965
11. Harlem Nightmare, 1965–1990
12. Old and New Dreams
Reviving the Renaissance
Illustration Credits
Sources and Further Reading
Index
1
UNRIGHTEOUS BEGINNINGS
From Muscoota to Nieuw Haarlem, 1609–1664
The first Harlemites didn’t quite know what to make of the strange object that
sailed up the river in the late summer of 1609. Was it some sort of gigantic
flying fish, or a huge swimming bird? And what of the strange, bearded
creatures on board? Where did they come from? What did they want? As the
earliest residents of the hilly island they called Manahatta would soon learn, the
strange object was the Half Moon, a boat belonging to the Dutch East India
Company and piloted by the English explorer Henry Hudson. For his part,
Hudson seems to have been just as perplexed by the native creatures he saw
lining the banks of the waterway they called Mahicanituk, or the River that
Flows Both Ways.
Hudson had little time to get to know these people. He was already supposed
to be in Asia, and he suspected that the silks and spices of China might lie just
upstream. The Half Moon, an eighty-five-foot-long, shallow-bottomed boat
suitable for ocean travel as well as for exploration of the uncharted North
American rivers that might offer a shortcut to the riches of the Orient, had
survived the terrors of the Atlantic crossing, but by the time Hudson first
glimpsed what would become the city of New York on September 3, 1609, the
vessel had wandered far off course. He anchored for several days at what is now
Sandy Hook, in the lower New York bay, and sent a party ashore. There Hudson
found the same fertile wilderness that he had seen all along the Atlantic coast
that summer, with plenty of food and water for the taking. He also found copper-
skinned people with black hair and black eyes—the men beardless, the women
tall, all ready to trade and quick with laughter and anger. The encounter turned
threatening and one member of the landing party was killed by an arrow while
racing back to the Half Moon. Hudson and his crew of twenty pressed on to
China.
By September 11, 1609, when the Half Moon entered the mile-wide river, the
“great streame” that would eventually bear its captain’s name, news of the
strange vessel had already reached the indigenous inhabitants of the richly
wooded lands just off starboard. Crowds of the natives, including women and
children, filled canoes and fearlessly paddled alongside the ship, sensing an
opportunity to trade with the crew, offering beans and oysters in return for beads
and mirrors. Hudson ordered his men to keep their distance, but the next day he
regained his confidence and, as the Half Moon reached the shores of the upper
part of the island, he decided to anchor. The next morning, just off an inlet at
what is now West 125th Street, a crowd of Indians again approached. At the
invitation of Hudson, two climbed on board, staying long enough for Hudson to
dress them in red jackets and then try to kidnap them. The two visitors broke free
and jumped overboard, mocking Hudson and his crew from shore. The first
Harlemites learned early on that white men were not to be trusted.
Hudson continued north, encountering numerous native people over the next
eleven days, many of them far less suspicious than those downriver. As the
mountains lining either side of the waterway grew higher the natives, who
quickly fell under the influence of Hudson’s wine, seemed ever more willing to
swap their corn and pumpkins for trinkets, tools, or textiles. After a hundred
miles it became clear that the narrowing river would not lead to Asia, so the
captain turned the Half Moon around and headed downstream, away from the
safety of the upper Hudson Valley and back down the river to more
unpredictable territory.
On October 2, as the Half Moon passed what is now West 140th Street, the
two natives that Hudson had tried to kidnap several weeks earlier led an attack
on the ship which, like all East India Company vessels bore a brass tablet fixed
to the forecastle reading “Do not fight without cause.” Hudson now had cause.
One of his crewmen wrote: “two Canoes full of men, with their Bows and
Arrowes shot at us after our sterne: in recompense whereof we discharged six
Muskets, and killed two or three of them.” The natives were not deterred, and
they sent another canoe full of men armed with bows and arrows. Hudson’s men
continued to fire their muskets, aiming their cannons at the Indians on the banks
as well. By the time it was all over the blood of nine more native Harlemites
stained the river’s shores.
The encounters between Henry Hudson and the residents of northern
Manhattan in 1609 were but a foretaste of Harlem’s future. 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. Uptown’s reputation as the soul of the American century
is indisputable. Yet even before the 1920s, when the distinctive beat of Harlem’s