Start a Riot! by Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani

Author:Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE HISTORY OF HARLEM AND ITS REPRESENTATION IN BRONX

Harlem, the setting of Bronx, has a complicated Black history. Between the 1880s and early 1900s, white landlords who desperately wanted to keep the neighborhood exclusively white collectively formed racially restrictive covenant laws. Such a plan on the part of white Harlemites would maintain their real estate property at a high value and attract other owners interested in purchasing the property. In “Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto,” Gilbert Osofsky notes that Blacks were historically considered the “most depressed and traditionally worst-housed people” (Osofsky 20). In other words, Black Harlemites were seen more as a liability than an asset in terms of wealth building. Why were they seen as a liability? What did they do to drive down property values? This prejudice stemmed from the historical nature of African descendants in the United States. For Black people, regardless of their national affiliation—whether they migrated north to New York or immigrated from the Caribbean or South America—racism limited their oppor­tunities to own property or work in sectors where they could earn higher wages. Redlining and other methods for restricting Blacks to particular areas in Harlem became so pronounced that, as Osofsky points out, some covenant agreements “even put a limitation on the number of Negro janitors, bellboys, laundresses, and servants that could be employed in a home” (21). Such organizations as the Harlem Property Owners’ Improvement Corporation and the West Side Improvement Association were adamant about dismantling “the Negro’s steady effort to invade Harlem,” as many whites perceived it (21). In some sections of Harlem, landlords placed whites-only signs in their apartment buildings. A movement had begun to keep the growing population of Blacks, particularly in Upper Manhattan, at low or relatively nonexistent levels. As Osofsky notes, “Negro realtors were contacted and told they would be wasting their time trying to find houses on certain streets” (22). By 1917 the New York state government confirmed that “racially restrictive housing covenants were unconstitutional” in Harlem, and Black people were afforded the opportunity to purchase, rent, and sell the property to other Black tenants (22). Although Black Americans could access a plethora of housing in Harlem, they were still conscious of racial violence happening throughout America.

On July 28, 1917, W. E. B. Du Bois, who was living in Harlem at the time, organized a silent march of Black children, women, and men down New York’s Fifth Avenue to protest lynching and anti-black violence exhibited in East St. Louis. Soyica Diggs Colbert argues that this kind of protest signaled “an act of enfranchisement that called attention to black citizens’ disenfranchisement” (Colbert, Black Movements 144). In many ways, the protest coalesced the mass demonstration for Black Harlem residents to equally protest against other forms of disenfranchisement, including housing segregation that continued in Harlem amidst unconstitutional housing laws.10 Through the subtle removal of racially restrictive covenants in Harlem, a prominent Black middle class grew and made Harlem an artistic and ethnically vibrant community, home to a New Negro/Harlem Renaissance.

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