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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 11, 1982)
FOOD SECTION Strlvara' Row la actually two rowa of beautifully raatored brown- atonaa between Lenox Avenue and Powell Boulevard In Harlem M oat of the bulldlnga are owned and occupied by middle-claaa Black profeaaionala who are returning to Harlem In growing num bare. The Apollo theater la a treaaured landmark of Harlem. For more than half a century it haa played boat to every major Black ainger, dancer and comedian. M any, Including Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn got thair flrat profaaaional engagements aa a raault of ap pearances on amateur night at tha Apollo. St. David AME Zion Church in Sag Harbor, L.I.N .Y ., dataa from 1840. Tha church waa built by Black seaman and flaharman with tha help of local Indiana. Reaidenta of Sag Harbor are working to have It declared a national landmark. Black History New York Style by Robert H. Elliott Mention Southern cooking to al- nos, anyone, and they'll know what you mean. Talk about New Orleans or Southwestern cooking, and they'll know what to expect. But what do you get when you visit fam ily and friends in New York, the Big Apple? Is there such a thing as a New Y ork style in home cooking? Is (here anything special about soul food across 11Oth Street? Those were the questions in the minds o f the people from K ra ft when they journeyed to New York to research an article in their series on the Heritage o f Black Cooking in America. They found that the cooking tra ditions in New York reflect the city itself— wide-ranging and cosmopo litan. Black cooking in New York is the product o f a complex heritage and a variety o f sources. This does not exactly fit the image some people hold about Black people in New York. They see more than a million Black souls squeezed into a small area at the north end of M an h attan : “ This place is called H arlem . It is the Black capital o f A m erica. A ll Blacks in New York live there. You lake the A train to get to Sugar H ill way up in Harlem. You have to take the A train be cause no taxi will take you there." The myth lives in part as the backwash o f a remarkable period in the '20s and '30s that is variously known as the Black Renaissance, the Negro Renaissance and the H a r lem Renaissance. But H arlem and Blacks had a lot o f history long be fore then. The first Blacks arrived in New York in the 17th and 18th centuries as indentured servants from England and Africa. Some came as slaves during New Y o rk ’s brief flir tation with slavery. In the years oetween the Revolu tion and the C ivil W ar, M anhattan and the surrounding boroughs be came a haven for free men and es caped slaves. It was a center o f the abolitionist movement, though not quite as active as Philadelphia and Boston. By the end o f the Civil W ar, there were substantial numbers o f Blacks living throughout the area, in the years that followed, their numbers increased slowly but steadily, and they settled in small communities in all parts o f the city. A t that tim e , the area north o f Central Park was largely rural farm land and generally inaccessible. In the last part o f the century, good roads and public tran s p o rta tio n made it an a ttra c tiv e residential area. By the turn o f the century, most o f the farms were gone and the good burghers who settled the area named it Harlem, after the river that forms its north border. Harlem is bordered on the east by the East River, by Eighth Avenue on the west and 110th Street on the south, although many people use the name to cover the entire area north o f 110th, C olum bia U n iver sity and M orningside Heights ex cepted. As the 20th century opened, H a r lem was a stable, prosperous com munity, if not necessarily the weal thiest or fanciest. The first Black families were a l most unnoticed when they settled in the community. That changed, how ever, in 1903 when an enterprising real estate broker began filling up whole apartment buildings and rows o f buildings w ith Black fam ilies, who had recently moved from the South. Some o f the white neighbors panicked. A t the same time, the practice o f The AME Zion camatary In Sag Harbor la Just acroaa tha road from 8t. David AME Zion Church. Lika tha church, It was craatad by and for tha famlllaa of Black aeamen and flaharman who llvad In Sag Harbor bafora tha Civil War. It la poaalbla to raad tha hlatory of Bag Harbor'a Black community on tha anclant atonaa of thia camatary. placing restrictive convenants on en tire neighborhoods was grow ing across the nation. It had the effect o f squeezing almost all o f the new Black migrants into Harlem. By the time o f W orld W ar I, Harlem was almost entirely Black. In the years after the war, there was a cultural explosion in Harlem , an o u tp o u rin g o f litc ras tu re and music by and about Black people that has been unequalled anywhere in its quantity, quality and effect on American life and art. Poets such as C laud e M c K a y , C ountee C u llen and Langston Hughes caught the eye and ear o f the world. Novels, criticism and es says flow ed from the pens o f Hughes, M cK ay, W .E .B . DuBois, Jean Toom er, E. Franklin Frazier, Alain Locke, A rthur A . A. Schom- burg and others. Schomburg amassed a collection o f the work o f the Renaissance and earlier periods. It became the basis for the nation's largest collection o f literary works by and about Black Americans. Today the collection is housed in the Harlem branch o f the New Y o rk Public L ib ra ry that is named for Schomburg. The literature o f the Renaissance made and im p o rtan t and lasting contribution to Am erican life, but the most visible effects were in music and the performing arts. H arlem supported between six and eight theater com panies at various times during that period. They performed works in the stan dard rep erto ry and new plays by Black writers. The commercial Broadway thea ter p referred works about Blacks from white playwrights, so many of the Black playwrights withered from neglect. Black actors were more fortunate and performers such as Paul Robe son, Ethel Waters, Charles G ilpin, and Richard B. Harrison made it to stardom on the Broadway stage. The real pride o f Harlem in those days was two night clubs and a thea ter: S m a ll’ s Paradise, the C o tto n Club and the Apollo. They featured the brightest and best Black musi cians, singers and comics o f the day. The C otton C lub in particular be came famous as the place where the D uke E llin g to n orchestra first caught national attention and Lena Horne performed as a showgirl. The C otton C lub was a favorite place fo r w ealthy whites from D ow ntow n to go slum m ing. Very few Black residents o f Harlem ever saw the inside o f the place. They w eren’ t very w elcom e, and the prices were sky high. Anyway, their hearts belonged to the A p o llo . They were welcome there, and they could afford it. I he A p o llo was home to every prominent Black entertainer from the Twenties right up to the Sixties, when, lik e everything else in H a r lem, it fell on bad times. In those four decades, the Apollo spawned more talen t than any comparable place in America. There is a saying among Black entertain ers: “ I f you haven’ t made it at the Apollo, you haven’t made it. I f you can make it at the A pollo, you can make it anywhere.” The audiences at the A p o llo are tough. A lot o f big names have been booed o ff the A pollo stage. And a lot o f stars have been created there. Billie H oliday, Ella Fitzgerald ana Sarah Vaughn were all discovered on Apollo amateur nights. It was not too difficult to believe that Harlem was all o f Black New York. Yet, even at the height o f the Ren aissance, Blacks were livin g and thriving in other areas o f New York, generally in smaller, satellite ghet- toes. A ll o f these communities m ain tained a measure o f economic stabil ity because the pattern o f racial seg regation enforced economic integra tion in the ghettoes. Well-to-do and w elfare fam ilies lived in close p ro xim ity even i f not in social intimacy. That helped the communi ty survive if not thrive, but it was not enough for what was coming. During the Depression and World W ar I I , very little was done to ex pand the housing supply in Harlem. The heavy influx o f new resident from the South during and after thi war turned Harlem into a pressuri cooker After the war, the development oi integrated public housing through out the five boroughs relieved som< o f the pressure. But not enough. At the same time, the lifting o f restric tive covenants made it easier fo Blacks w ith means to live almos anywhere they chose. They chos< not to live in Harlem. Its feeble eco nomic base disappeared. In the Seventies, H arlem lookei and fe lt lik e a war zone. It was i place where almost no one went un (Please turn to Page 10) BLACK HISTORY '82 IN 1962, HERMAN RUSSELLWAS THE HRST BLACK ADMITTED TO THE ATLANTA CHAMBER OF COM M ERCE TODAY HE’S JUST COMPLETED HIS TERM AS PRESIDENT Black H is to ry is livin g history. It grows day a fte r day thro ug h the achievements of people like Herman Russell His vision and energy built his contracting business into a m ulti-m illion dollar enterprise. One of his firms biggest accomplishments was helping build America s newest and largest airport, Hartsfield Airport, in Atlanta We re proud to congratulate Herman Russell. His future is sure to make history. UK R LOCAL COCA-COLA BOTTLER ACKNCMLEDGES LIVING BIACk HISTORY I Ht COCA i 0 l A u 'M f'A R t 19(1«’ COCA COCA ARP COM ARt M ü lS H M l) IRADt MARAS WHICH IfWN i l i V i H l A M I PS<Wd*1 n t im im a
