Peter Lattu

Harlem Stomp!
A Review

Among histories of the period, Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance by Laban Carrick Hill is one of the best. Hill sets the background to the Renaissance: the Great Migration, World War I, and the rise of black consciousness. There are short, incisive, vignettes of literary life, music and dance, theater including musicals, and visual arts. A chapter traces the history of Harlem itself as an urban mecca drawing African-Americans from around the United States. It was an exciting time to be there.

Hill excels in putting the Harlem Renaissance into its social context. Because so many talented African-Americans were right there in Harlem in the 1920’s, Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity, could throw a party with the whole literary world there, black and white, to introduce “the New Negro”. The Civic Club Dinner brought the publishers and editors of New York City together with the new African- American writers. Out of this dinner came a special issue of Survey Graphic featuring many of these new writers. From the Survey Graphic feature came the anthology The New Negro edited by Alain Locke. All of this was made possible by the proximity of people in New York City and Harlem.

This knack for putting things into context shows up in other ways. Other surveys of the period state that Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” was a landmark work signaling the rise of black consciousness and the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. None of the other surveys, however, explain why it was a landmark. Hill places that poem in the midst of the bloody race riots of 1919, called “the Red Summer” by James Weldon Johnson. McKay’s poem struck a note of defiance in difficult times and was published widely in the African-American press across the country. Here Hill has made clear what other surveys only hint at.

Harlem Stomp! abounds in apt anecdotes. With the Depression killing his literary career, the poet Countee Cullen returned to teaching French in high school in Manhattan. One of his students was James Baldwin, who interviewed Cullen for the school newspaper. Thus the torch was passed to another generation of black writers.

Such deft touches fill Harlem Stomp!. It includes a rich literary survey through select quotes. The stunning and inviting graphic design enhances the period artwork, illustrations and photographs. The Harlem Renaissance closed with the stock market crash of 1929 and the end of Prohibition. Willie “the Lion” Smith quipped: “It was legal liquor that did to Harlem what scarcer tips and shuttered warehouses had failed to do.” Harlem became an urban ghetto with nearly fifty percent unemployment. If they could, the artists left for teaching jobs elsewhere. Otherwise, they foundered in poverty. The Renaissance was over.

{Written by Peter Lattu}