Morgan Thompson – a West Indian Laborer’s Life in Harlem

A West Indian, born in 1888, who arrived in Harlem in 1917, Morgan Thompson* was convicted of assault in 1928 after he lost his temper and stabbed a man who had confronted his seventeen year old son  on West 144th Street.

(* This name is a pseudonym, used at the request of the Municipal Archives)

The most striking feature of Thompson’s life revealed by mapping it is the distance from Harlem that he traveled to work. He was employed as a laborer by construction contractors. Between 1928 and 1933, the years he spent on probation, he labored on fifteen different constructions sites, in downtown Manhattan and on the Upper East Side, and in the outer boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.  Only once did he work in Harlem, on the new YMCA on 135^th Street. (Note: some of the addresses outside Harlem are approximate locations)

Laboring was by nature itinerant work, but employment in the other occupations open to blacks was also unstable and required them to travel beyond Harlem, producing the crowds photographed pouring out of the 135th Street subway station in rush hour, in this image from the Survey Graphic Harlem Number.

Laboring, like many of the jobs open to black men, was also dangerous. The previous September Thompson had suffered a workplace injury, for which he received compensation. Within a month of returning to work after his arrest, Thompson injured his ankle so badly that it would be three months before he could put sufficient weight on it to work.  And then, after only a month back at work, Morgan suffered a smashed finger.

In Harlem, in 1928 Thompson lived with his wife of seventeen years, Margaret, a domestic servant three years his junior who also hailed from the West Indies, and two children, George, and fifteen-year-old Elizabeth. The same four bedroom apartment at ??? West 144th Street had been their home for all eleven years they had resided in New York City.  Part of the attraction would have been that West Indians  made up three quarters of those who lived in the building.  Thompson also sought out fellow immigrants in his leisure time, joining the Victoria Society, a West Indian social club with rooms on West 137th Street, and occasionally attending an Episcopal Church on 140th Street, whose members would have been overwhelmingly West Indian.

In April 1929, the family were evicted from their apartment, unable to pay their rent due to the injuries that kept Thompson from working.  In relocating, Thompson refused to consider cheaper apartments, which he considered uninhabitable, and chose instead a six room apartment on West 143rd Street, close to their old home and community.  The family rented the extra rooms, with several individuals and a married couple occupying them in the ensuing years.  Taking in lodgers was a common strategy to help pay the rent; one third of the other tenants in the building also had lodgers in 1930.  The Thompsons also relied on the wages of the two children; George had a position in a dress factory, and later as a scarf maker, and his sister Elizabeth was employed in a hat factory.  Any surplus money they had George deposited in an account at the Empire State Bank on 125th Street. When the children too lost their jobs as the Depression worsened, Morgan was able to obtain work through relief agencies, allowing the family to remain in their new home at least until 1933, when his probation ended.

A more detailed account of Morgan Thompson’s life in Harlem can be found in our article, “This Harlem Life: Black Families and Everyday Life in the 1920s and 1930s,” which will appear in the Spring 2011 issue of the Journal of Social History.

Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History

I’m pleased to announce that Digital Harlem has been awarded the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History.

We will be using the funds to upgrade the layer of building footprints on the map.  The first fruits of this work have already been added to the site: the partial layer of hand drawn footprints has been replaced with images of maps from an atlas produced by G W Bromley & Co., currently covering the area from 110th to 145th Street, with further images covering the area up to 155th Street to come.

The atlas we own is a 1932 map which has been updated to reflect changes that occurred up to 1940, so in coming weeks we will be working to correct it to reflect conditions in the 1920s.  Thanks to Andrew Wilson and his colleagues at the ACL for their work on this project

The receipt of this award does bring with it some sadness. I had the privilege of briefly being Roy Rosenzweig’s colleague, and he was an inspiration for my subsequent work in digital history.  Roy was also a good friend of one of my collaborators, Shane White.  We miss him.

Digital Harlem at the SSHA Conference

I’ll be giving a presentation on Digital Harlem — “Mapping Everyday Life: Digital Harlem, 1915-1930” — in Long Beach, California, on November 13, 2009, as part of the Social Science History Association Conference.

Divorce Raids

Divorce raids were a staple of the Amsterdam News throughout the 1920s, and featured a cross section of respectable Harlem, from physicians, dentists, attorneys, insurance agents, musicians and bandleaders, to clergymen, prominent lodge members, churchgoers, and individuals simply identified as “well-known Harlemites,” caught throughout the neighborhood in bed with people other than their spouses.  Private detectives, most notably the West Indian Herbert Boulin, led the raiding parties, which consisted of the aggrieved spouses and several friends and relatives, brought along as witnesses who could provide testimony of the adultery they witnessed.  Many of the couples involved were already separated; what was at issue was alimony, which one party either wished to obtain or avoid paying.

Divorce Raids (Search Event type = Divorce Raids)

The raids take place at addresses scattered throughout the neighborhood, but concentrated in the areas of better housing, particularly on the western boundary of Harlem.  This pattern is made more obvious if prostitution arrests are overlaid on the map: there are no raids in the slum district west of Lenox Avenue in which prostitution arrests are concentrated.  If that juxtaposition, on the one hand, highlights a class based distinction in the sexual geography of Harlem, on the other hand it shows that illicit sexuality was not limited to one part of the neighborhood, but instead took different forms in different places.

Divorce Raids & Prostitution arrests, 1925 & 1930

Prostitution arrests

Prostitutes were among the blacks who migrated from the San Juan Hill neighborhood to Harlem.  As early as 1919, according to reformer Willoughby Waterman, they had relocated from West Side Ave between  34^th and 56^th Streets to the area of 7^th Avenue from 132^nd to 143^rd Streets.  The number of black prostitutes arrested by police was out of proportion with their presence in the population, according to figures we found in the bulletins of the Committee of Fourteen, the private white anti-prostitution organization: the proportion of blacks fluctuated between 20% and 40% of the women arrested through the 1920s.  One reason why so many were arrested was that most black women were among the poorest and cheapest prostitutes and solicited on the streets, making them easily detected by police.

Black prostitutes less often took men back to rooms than did their white counterparts, resorting instead to hallways, taxicabs and other ‘semi-public’ spaces.  When they did take men into residences, it was most often not to their homes, but to rooms that could be rented briefly as a place to entertain a ‘friend.’  Of the 78 prostitutes who solicited the Committee of Fourteen’s black investigator in 1928, and offered to take him to a room, only 16 (20%) offered to take him to their homes. Black prostitutes’ practice of not taking men to rooms led police to conduct fewer jump raids — in which officers who saw a woman solicit a man in the street followed the couple when they went to a room, and then burst in on them — in Harlem than in white neighbourhoods.

Information on the addresses at which arrests were made can be found in a card file index kept by the Committee of Fourteen.  We collected information for January, April, July and October 1925 & 1930.

Arrests for Prostitution in 1925 (Search Event type= Prostitution)

The addresses where police did make arrests were clustered between 127^th Street and 135^th Street, off the avenues that ran north-south through Harlem, with the densest grouping in the poor quality tenements east of Lenox Avenue.  This was the area that writer Wallace Thurman described as Harlem’s “slum district,” with Lenox Avenue in this area “dirty and noisy.” Few arrests took place in addresses in the blocks of better standard housing north of 135^th Street and west of Lenox Avenue.

Arrests for Prostitution, 1930 (Search Event Type = Prostitution)

The greater spread of arrests in 1930 is largely a consequence of the spreading boundaries of black settlement in Harlem: arrests appear on 8th Avenue and further uptown and in greater numbers near 125th Street as blacks move to these area.

Prostitution arrests 1925 & 1930

“This Harlem Life” in the Journal of Social History

Our article “This Harlem Life: Black Families and Everyday Life in the 1920s and 1930s” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Social History.  It will appear in the Spring 2011 issue.

The article uses the Probation Department files to reconstruct the lives of five men “to highlight what the black metropolis offered those outside the elite, to show how ordinary blacks negotiated the challenges, and drew on institutions and organizations, to establish and sustain new lives.  We offer the kind of individualized perspective on everyday life that other scholars have provided for high culture, but which does not exist for Harlem, even in early twentieth century sociological studies of black life.”   Relationships with spouses, children, siblings and cousins sustained individuals faced with the social reality of living in overcrowded, deteriorating, disease infested housing, subject to the racism of white police, politicians and employers; so too did friendships made in nightclubs, speakeasies, dances and movie theatres, and membership of churches, fraternal organizations, social clubs, and sports clubs and teams.

There are blog posts about two of the men we discuss –  Fuller Long* & Morgan Thompson*.  The other men — Perry Brown*, Frank Hamilton* & Roger Walker* — can also be found in the database.  Watch out for blog posts on each of them.

*These names are pseudonyms, as required by Municipal Archives

Digital Harlem in Melbourne

I’ll be giving a presentation on Digital Harlem — “Digital History & Digital Harlem” — in Melbourne, on June 5, 2009, as part of the “Writing American History Conference” organized by the the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne

Harlem Undercover – the maps

My article, “Harlem Undercover: Vice Investigators, Race, and Prostitution, 1910-1930,” is now available in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Urban History. The abstract is below:

In 1928, the Committee of Fourteen, New York City’s leading private antivice organization, employed a black teacher to conduct a five-month undercover investigation of Harlem’s nightlife.  It had been ten years since the committee had subjected the neighborhood to such intensive surveillance. Typically explained as the result of racism, that neglect also reflected white investigators’ increasing inability to gather information in Harlem. This article explores the work of investigators and the racial dynamics of undercover investigations to show how those difficulties grew from the congregation of waves of new black migrants in the neighborhood and, as Prohibition drew whites to Harlem, blacks’ retreat into private spaces, buffet flats, for their leisure. It uses the rich snapshot offered by the black investigator’s reports to reveal how, in the 1920s, black prostitutes, rather than being successfully regulated, blended into these new black spaces.

The article does not include maps, but the buffet flats that Claymes investigated, and nightclubs and speakeasies, are among the locations included in the ‘Digital Harlem’ database, so it is possible to generate maps of the spaces that it discusses.

What is a buffet flat?  An apartment that in the evening, and after nightclubs closed, operated as a venue offering alcohol, music, dancing, prostitutes, and, commonly, gambling, and, less often, rooms to which a couple could go. Their location in residential buildings offered a degree of protection from policing, and from whites: most proprietors and patrons of buffet flats were black.  Rent parties have become the best known of the entertainments on offer in 1920s Harlem, but buffet flats were more widespread and more central to black nightlife.  They did not charge admission, as the hosts of rent parties did, nor advertise widely, but they were ongoing concerns that offered privacy that parties did not.

Mapping the buffet flats identified by Raymond Claymes shows that they were spread throughout Harlem:

Buffet Flats

Adding nightclubs to the map reveals a different geography: those public venues, many of which admitted white as well as black patrons, were clustered below 140th Street and on and to the east of Seventh Avenue.  That area was both the core of Harlem, the area of the original black settlement, and close to New York’s white neighborhoods, and the commercialized leisure of West 125th Street, patronized largely by whites until the end of the 1920s:

Buffet Flats & Nightclubs

Adding speakeasies to the map shows that they were spread throughout the neighborhood, including  on Eighth Avenue and above 140th Street.  But above 140th Street, a largely residential district distant from slumming whites, buffet flats predominated:

Buffet Flats, Nightclubs & Speakeasies

Fuller Long: A teenager’s life in Harlem

Fuller Long* was a seventeen-year-old African American boy placed on probation in 1928, after having been convicted of having sexual intercourse with his underage girlfriend.  The map shows his life in Harlem.
(Note: the image accompanying this map on the Digital Harlem site is not of Fuller Long, but a photo by James Van Der Zee of the Alpha Phi Alpha Basketball Team, taken in 1926 in front of their Harlem fraternity house, in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
(* This name is a pseudonym, used at the request of the Municipal Archives)

This map is currently one of the Featured Maps on the Digital Harlem site; simply click on the image in the right hand column of the site to see the map. The pop-up box that opens contains an abbreviated version of the information contained in this post.

Together with his parents and two sisters, Long migrated to Harlem from Petersburg, Virginia, in 1923, living for two years at 46 West 132nd St, then in an apartment next door, at 48 West 132nd Street. (The buildings are so close to each other that you need to zoom to the closest level to distinguish them) Such residential stability was true of many families in 1920s Harlem, particularly those with multiple wage-earners (Long’s mother worked as a janitor, and later a housekeeper, and his older sister had a job in a factory; two months after they arrived, Long’s father left the family)

Long stayed in school until the end of ninth grade, when his mother insisted they needed his income to meet expenses and keep his younger sister in school. Schooling kept young blacks in the neighborhood; in the 1920s, Harlem had five public elementary schools and two junior high schools, one for boys, one for girls, a vocational school, and at least two Catholic schools and one private girls school.

Harlem's Schools (Search for Place, 'Location type' = 'School')

When Long left school, he worked first for ice-man based across the street from his home, and then worked outside the district, downtown and in the Bronx. What a New York Times reporter described on March 24, 1935 was also true of the 1920s: “Every morning sees an exodus of workers filling subways, surface cars and elevated trains and every evening sees them returning to their homes (E11).”  Harlem offered few jobs for blacks, with most of the businesses owned and staffed by whites, so Long was one of many residents who spent their working days outside its boundaries.

Long’s time in Harlem was thus spent at home and in leisure, at locations such as the Abyssinian Baptist Church (occasionally), venues where he played sport (gymnasiums where he played basketball (often) and a recreation centre where he swam), dance halls, and at the home of his girlfriend.  Most were within 10 blocks of his home.

It was sports that provided community ties that gave order and stability to Long’s life, and helped keep him from the ‘waywardness’ that reformers expected of the child of a single mother.

Basketball, Long’s particular passion, had a central place in 1920s Harlem.  The neighborhood was home to the Rens, the preeminent black professional team in the 1920s (for which White unsuccessfully tried out in November 1930), and to teams fielded by a variety of different athletic clubs, such as the St Christopher Club (based at St Philip’s Episcopal Church) and the Alpha Physical Culture Club.  Black fraternites regularly played in Harlem, and by the end of the 1920s, an interchurch league was in operation.  Harlem’s schools began competing in the Public School Athletic League in 1910, and by the 1920s repeatedly won championships in basketball. PS 89, where Long played, were city  champions from 1928 to 1937, when they lost to PS 139, Harlem’s junior high school.  Girls and women’s teams also competed, included teams of nurses from Harlem Hospital.

The main venue for basketball was the Renaissance Ballroom (2359 7th Ave), but games were also played at the Alhambra Ballroom (2110 7th Ave), the Palace Garden Casino (2395 7th Ave) and the Manhattan Casino, 258 West 155th St, at the YMCA, and in the gymnasiums of Harlem’s churches and schools.

Harlem's basketball venues (Search Events, 'Event type' = Basketball Game)

Other layers you could add to this map:

• Annie Dillard** (who worked in domestic service, outside Harlem, but in different parts of the city to Long.  She was also a single mother, dependent on family for support and shelter, who consequently experienced less residential stability than Long)

• Roger Walker* (who worked as a counterman at various drug stores and restaurants in Harlem.  Single and lacking stable employment, he changed residence frequently until his marriage)



(* This name is a pseudonym, used at the request of the Municipal Archives)

(** This name is a pseudonym, as required by the NY State Archives)

Churches

Church Buildings in Harlem (This map is currently one of the Featured Maps on the Digital Harlem site; simply click on the image in the right hand column of the site to see the map. The pop-up box that opens contains an abbreviated version of the information contained in this post.)

Churches were the most prominent black places and institutions in Harlem. They made a powerful impression on visitors to the neighborhood, such as the (white?) journalist who wrote in The Independent in 1921 that “In the main, [Harlem] is impressive. Especially the churches.” This map shows 52 black church buildings located in the neighborhood. They were home to a variety of Christian denominations: Baptist; African Methodist Episcopal; Protestant Episcopal; Presbyterian; Congregationalist; Catholic; 7th Day Adventist; African Orthodox, Holiness; and Apostolic.

A number were elaborate, grand complexes, which coupled houses of worship that seated over a thousand, with community houses, incorporating gymnasiums, reading rooms, recreation rooms and offices. (On the map, those structures have large, distinctive footprints that suggest how they stood apart from the surrounding buildings). The buildings reflect the broad role Harlem’s churches played in community life: they organized athletic clubs (particularly basketball teams), classes ranging from vocational training to art, choirs and musical groups, and social clubs.  It was such activities that James Weldon Johnson had in mind when he wrote in Black Manhattan (1930) that a Harlem church is “much more besides a place of worship.  It is a social center, it is a club, it is an arena or the exercise of one’s capabilities and powers, a world in which one may achieve self-realization and preferment (165).”

Fourteen of the largest churches were purchased by black congregations moving uptown from white congregations (Christian and Jewish), whose members had left Harlem. These included:

West 128th St and 7th Ave
409 West 141st St
201 Lenox Ave

The other congregations that had taken over church buildings in Harlem by 1930 were: Mother Zion AME Church (136th St); Grace Congregational Church (139th St); Emanuel AME Church (119th St); Salem Methodist Church (129th St); St John AME Church (128th St); Mt Calvary United Methodist Church (Edgecombe Ave); Little Mount Zion AME Church (140th St); Transfiguration Lutheran Church (126th St); Williams Institutional CME Church (130th St), St Martins Episcopal Church (Lenox Ave) and Ephesesus 7th-Day Adventist Church (Lenox Ave).

Not all the church buildings in Harlem passed into the hands of black churches. The Catholic Church retained its presence in Harlem, preaching to congregations increasingly made up of blacks.

Nine other relocating black congregations built their own grand churches, including St Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church on West 134th Street (the wealthiest church in Harlem), the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th St, which seated 3000, and St Mark’s Methodist Church, with seating for 2000.

208 W 134th St (NYPL Digital Gallery)
136-142 West 138th St (NYPL Digital Gallery)

St Mark's Methodist Church, 49 Edgecombe Ave (NYPL Digital Gallery)

The other churches built by blacks were: Mother Zion AME Church (137th St); St James Presbyterian Church (137th St); Salem United Methodist (133rd); Rush Memorial (138th St); the Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle (138th St); and Shiloh Baptist (7th Ave). Smaller churches converted residences or theatres, such as Metropolitan AME Church (134th St) and Union Baptist Church (145th St).

Mother Zion AME Church pursued both strategies, first taking over a church on West 136th St, and then building its own, more elaborate building behind that structure, facing West 137th Street, with a community house and gymnasium.

153 West 136th St (NYPL Digital Gallery)
Mother Zion AME Church, 140 West 137th Street (NYPL Digital Gallery)

As the example of Mother Zion suggests, setting up in Harlem was often not the final move a congregation made. It was common to relocate within the neighborhood, seeking more space as membership grew. Thus while on first glance the map suggests Harlem’s churches were spread throughout the neighborhood, by the late 1920s, most of the major houses of worship were located on or near 7th Avenue, or further west. That was where the churches built by white congregations were located. Only below 125th Street, where the black population did not predominate until 1930, were there major church buildings on Lenox Avenue and further east.

The location of Harlem’s church buildings had an impact on the spaces around them.  As Theophilus Lewis noted in his column in The Amsterdam News on January 22, 1930, “As most of the churches, and the biggest ones, are either on [7th] Avenue or only a few steps away, the thoroughfare is also the main artery of the town’s religious life (9).”  The concentration of structures concentrated Harlem’s churchgoers, giving the street a religious character – at least on Sunday mornings.  As Lewis went on to note, twelve hours earlier, on Saturday evenings, 7th Avenue was a “hub of amusement,” filled with “throngs out for hours of joy” in the very forms of leisure  that many Harlem clergy denounced as the greatest obstacles to religious practice.

Church buildings were not the only locations in which Harlemites worshiped. Missing from this map are the churches that operated in storefronts and residences, which far outnumbered those housed in church buildings. Writing in Opportunity magazine in 1926, Ira Reid reported finding 140 churches in 150 blocks in Harlem; two thirds were located in former storefronts, on the first floor of private dwellings, or in the back room of a flat (274). A portion of those churches were what James Weldon Johnson, in his Black Manhattan, described as “ephemeral and nomadic,…here today and gone somewhere else or gone entirely tomorrow (163-4).”  Reid experienced that turnover: returning six weeks after he made his list, seven of the churches could no longer be found (275). Both this transience, and the location of these churches within structures designed for other purposes, meant that they had less of an impact on the streetscape of Harlem than the church buildings that appear on this map.  Rather than marking out distinct spaces within the neighborhood,  storefront churches contributed to the fluidity of commercial spaces: a store could be not only a place of commerce; it could also be a place of worship, or a front for the sale of illegal liquor — a speakeasy — or for the numbers racket.

Other layers you could add to this map:

• Unfortunately Reid does not provide locations for the ‘house churches’ he found, but one group, the spiritualist churches (which combined communication with the dead with elements of Christianity) did advertise in the black press. To add them to this map, do a ‘Place’ search for ‘Location type’ “Spiritualists”.
• To explore the location of churches in relation to some of the aspects of Harlem life against which their leaders fought, do a ‘Place’ search for ‘Location type’ “Speakeasies”