The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Harlem

Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was headquartered in Harlem from 1918 to 1927.  The organization generally appears in accounts of Harlem on parade, on the occasion of its conventions.  However, the UNIA occupied more than the streets. Its headquarters was on West 135th Street, as were the offices of a number of the organizations it established.  Liberty Hall, the site of weekly meetings and the annual convention, was on West 138th Street, while a range of UNIA owned and operated businesses occupied buildings in the heart of Harlem.

UNIA Offices and Businesses, 1918-1927 (search Places, Location Name=UNIA)

Liberty Hall, 1922 (Marcus Garvey & UNIA Papers)

Garvey purchased Liberty Hall in 1919.  The single level hall with low ceilings had previously been home to the Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle. From 1922 the hall bordered the grand new home of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, meaning that the UNIA met adjacent to the largest African American church in New York City, one of the bastions of the Harlem establishment with which Garvey was frequently at odds. Although the UNIA’s home had a far less impressive exterior than the church, once festooned with flags and banners, and filled with up to 6000 people, including many in the uniforms of the UNIA’s soldiers, nurses and officials, the hall became the heart of Garvey’s vision for blacks in the US and around the world.

Detail from Bromley map (1925) The 1930 map on Digital Harlem shows one of the apartment buildings later constructed on the site by Casper Holstein

On Sunday evenings, Liberty Hall hosted the weekly meeting of the UNIA.  James Weldon Johnson, in a widely quoted account, offered a critical take on what occurred in the building, noting that “Meetings at Liberty Hall were conducted with an elaborate liturgy.  The moment for the entry of the Provisional President into the auditorium was solemn; a hushed and expectant silence on the throng, the African Legion and Black Nurses flanking the long aisle coming to attention, the band and audience joining in the hymn: “Long Live Our President:” and Garvey, surrounded by his guard of honor from the Legion, marching majestically through the double line and mounting the rostrum; it was impressive if for no other reason than the way in which it impressed the throng (Black Manhattan, 255).”

Source: Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers

A typical Sunday evening meeting did resemble religious services, opening with prayers and the UNIA anthem, musical programs featuring the Liberty Choir and the Black Star Line Band, and a range of speakers, and included fundraising collections.  For a time, Liberty Hall also hosted religious services on Sunday mornings. The  UNIA almost lost the hall in early 1927, having been forced to mortgage it, until numbers king Casper Holstein stepped in.  However, he sold it at the end of the year, and by 1930 apartments occupied part of the site (shown on the map in Digital Harlem).

UNIA Headquarters, 54-56 West 135th Street (Marcus Garvey & UNIA Papers)

The UNIA headquarters, and the offices of the Black Star Line, was located first at 36 West 135th Street, in the Crescent Theater building, and from 1919, at 54-56 West 135th Street, next door to the Lincoln Theater, locations at the very heart of black Harlem. Although white journalist and NAACP officer Herbert Seligman described them as “dingy old dwelling houses…converted to new uses,” the offices clearly appeared as much more to black residents. When Captain Hugh Malzac visited, outside was “a line more than 100 yards long waiting to enter.  There were jobseekers and supplicants, stock-owners-to-be and a few hero worshippers who simply wanted to tell Mr Garvey how proud they were of him for what he was doing for the race.” “To walk into these offices,” white journalist and NAACP officer Herbert Seligman wrote in 1921, “was to enter a fantastic realm in which cash sales of shares and the imminence of destiny strangely commingle.” Garvey’s office was on the third floor.  By 1921, the UNIA needed extra office space, and expanded next door to 52 West 135th Street.  It retained offices there until January 1926, when the building was sold to pay back taxes; 54-56 West 135th Street was also sold in November 1926.

Advertisement from the Negro World (Marcus Garvey & UNIA Papers)

The UNIA established the African Communities’ League in 1918 and the Negro Factories Corporation in 1920 as the business side of the organization, to show that blacks could compete with whites and makes them self-reliant. In Harlem, the Corporation opened the Universal Steam Laundry, with 50 employees, and the Universal Tailoring and Dress Making Department, both at 62 West 142nd Street, producing UNIA uniforms and fashionable clothing, which was displayed in fashion shows at Liberty Hall. The Corporation also operated three grocery stores, two restaurants, one in Liberty Hall, and a printing plant. The printing plant gave the UNIA an address on Seventh Avenue, the most prestigious of Harlem’s avenues, which was on its way to becoming the black neighborhood’s main street, and a location that Garvey used to advantage as the site of a reviewing platform for the 1924 parade (see below). The other enterprises were located on the less prestigious Lenox Avenue and on 135th Street east of Lenox Avenue, with laundry in an industrial area. These enterprises employed over 200 people, but by the end of 1922, most had gone out of business.

Source: Marcus Garvey & UNIA Papers

At the 1922 UNIA convention, Garvey also announced the creation of the Phyllis Wheatley Hotel, to house delegates, and the Booker T. Washington University, at 3-13 West 136th Street . The university offered training in civil service, agriculture and commerce for UNIA officers. Exactly how long it operated is unclear.

The UNIA’s presence on the streets, however, survived even as its ownership of structures crumbled.  The grandest parades took place while Garvey was in the US, on the occasions of the conventions in 1920, 1921, 1922 and 1924 (Garvey, in prison awaiting bail having being charged with mail fraud and fearing divisions within the organization, canceled the 1923 convention and parade.).

Reviewing platform, in front of UNIA Printing and Publishing House, 2305 7th Avenue, 1922 (Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers)

On these occasions, uniformed members of the African Legion, Black Cross Nurses and dignitaries and placard bearing members paraded up and down Seventh and Lenox Avenues as far south as Central Park, putting on a spectacle for black residents and their neighbors in the blocks further south (for details, see the post on Parades; there is only sufficient evidence to map the routes of the 1920, 1922 and 1924 parades).

Even in Garvey’s absence, UNIA members continued to parade each August for the remainder of the 1920s, bearing portraits of their deported leader. Several thousand marched on each occasion, according to press reports, but they did not venture outside black Harlem, as in earlier years, to confront white New Yorkers.  The 1930 parade ventured the furthest south, to 120th Street, but by then that area was almost entirely populated by blacks.

UNIA Parade 1930

The reduced reach and challenge of the parades paralleled the lost offices and businesses.  Although still a part of the neighborhood’s life, after 1924 the UNIA did not have the presence it had in the early years of the 1920s.

—

Lerone Bennett Jr., “Marcus Garvey’s Day of Triumph.” Ebony (November 1976)

Herbert Seligman, “Negro Conquest,” World Magazine (4 December 1921)

For a good overview of the UNIA, see David Van Leeuwen, “Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” (National Humanities Center)

Read Full Post »

Harlem’s Beauty Parlors

Beauty parlors (Search Place, Location type="Beauty parlor")

Beauty parlors were the most prevalent form of black business in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s.  When George Edmund Haynes, the black sociologist and founder of the Urban League, surveyed the neighborhood’s businesses in 1921 he found 103 hairdressers, compared to 63 tailors, pressers and cleaners and 51 barbers.  Simm’s Blue Book, a directory of black businesses and professionals published in 1923, listed 161 beauty salons, more than any other enterprise.  Combining that list with the businesses that advertised in Harlem’s newspapers, the map shows the location of 199 beauty parlors that operated in the 1920s. So many existed because it took relatively little capital to open a beauty parlor, particularly if you operated out of your home, as most women in Harlem did.  Of the 103 hairdressers identified by Haynes in 1921, 46 operated out of stores and 57 from their homes. Beauty parlors also proliferated because the trade provided an alternative to domestic service, an occupation based in Harlem rather than in the homes of whites, which even if it still involved sweating and scrubbing was, in the words of an operator overheard by Federal Writers’ Project interviewer Vivian Morris in a salon in 1939,”cleaner and you don’t have no white folks goin’ around behind you trying to find a spec of dirt.”

Beauty Shop in Harlem, 1935 © Bettmann/CORBIS

While most beauty salons were in homes, they were nonetheless a prominent presence along the streets occupied by the neighborhood’s businesses, particularly 7th Avenue (the photo on the left is of 2131 7th Avenue, near 125th St). Helen Bullitt Lowry, writing in the New York Times on August 21, 1921, associated beauty parlors with the more middle-class style of Seventh Avenue: On Lenox Avenue, “the proleteriat heart of the Black belt”,  “the language is frank and from the shoulder. “Straightening combs fifteen cents.”  But on Seventh Avenue, “the beauty parlors on the first floor hint more mysteriously. “Hair culture. The Poro System.  Satisfaction guaranteed.” Groups of heads leaning out of any apartment house stone-cased windows demonstrate what it means to be permanently unkinked.” The map above, which draws on Simm’s Blue Book and later sources, shows only eight beauty parlors on Lenox Avenue, compared with 32 on 7th Avenue. By the 1930s, as the Depression brought an expansion in the beauty trade, which was perceived as “depression-proof,” 7th Avenue became dominated by beauty salons.  In 1939, Vivian Morris, described a more elaborate geography that encompassed a cross-section of Harlem’s population: on the avenues between 135th and 110th Streets were beauty parlors that catered to the “average Harlemite,” particularly women employed as domestic servants; on 7th avenue between 135th and 138th Streets were the “Theatrical” parlors, which catered to men and women; while further north on 7th were the “elite” parlors whose clients came from the better residences of Sugar Hill, often by car; and finally, “hometown” shops filled the cross streets, bringing together operators and clients that hailed from the same parts of the South.

Madam C J Walker's Townhouse, 108-110 West 136th Street (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL)

By far Harlem’s most elaborate beauty parlor was the Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Shoppe, at 110 West 136th Street, in the elaborate townhouse built by Walker in 1914, and occupied in the 1920s by her daughter A’Lelia, until it became the home of a government Health Centre in 1930.  The building also housed a beauty school teaching the Walker System.  At least five other beauty schools operated in Harlem, the largest being the Poro School, at 1997 7th Avenue, and the Apex School, on the corner of 7th Avenue and 135th Street, both of which taught nationally marketed systems that competed with the Walker system for dominance in Harlem and elsewhere in black America.  In October 1927, for example, the Pittsburgh Courier‘s Harlem reporter claimed that Sarah Spencer-Washington, president of Apex Hair Company, had initiated a “Beauty War” by opening a string of new beauty parlors on 7th Avenue.

Interior of Beauty Parlor (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL)

Much more than hairstyling took place in beauty parlors.  They also served as centers of community life, places, as a writer in the Afro American put it in October 1926, where “one may learn the latest Harlem news, listen to the choicest bits of scandal, hear the private life of one’s neighbor’s discussed, and collect opinions of all and sundry on the events of the day.” Perhaps more unexpectedly, they were also “marts of exchange for everything salable from lingerie to tickets for dances, church socials or what have you.”  Not all that business was legal, even in elite beauty parlors. While Vivian Morris was in “a swanky shop,” listening to customers discuss the international situation and the latest bestseller, a man entered, and went to the back of the shop, from where he sold “hot stuff,” stolen lingerie with ten dollar tags for three dollars.

"A numbers headquarters at 351 Lenox Avenue in Harlem" (1938) © New York Daily News

At a “hometown” shop the illegal trade Morris witnessed was playing the numbers, with a runner arriving to collect bets from operators and customers.  As more numbers betting moved to stores during the struggles between black and white bankers for control of the racket in Harlem, beauty parlors became centers for gambling.  The New York Daily News in 1938 identified the Ritzy Beauty Salon at 351 Lenox Avenue, an Apex parlor based on the signs displayed in the window, as a numbers ‘headquarters.’

Harlem’s beauty parlors also contributed to life in the neighborhood in less direct ways.  The career of A Philip Randolph, the socialist and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was supported by his wife Lucille Green Randolph, one of the first graduates of the Walker Beauty School in Harlem, who operated an exclusive beauty parlor on 135th Street from 1913 to 1927.

Read Full Post »

Harlem’s Soapbox Speakers

Soapbox or street corner speakers were a feature of everyday life in Harlem from World War One to the 1960s.  Each year, the appearance of speakers was heralded as a sign of spring, and they were particularly prevalent through the summer months, when the heat led residents of Harlem to spend most of their leisure outdoors.  The first speakers were political orators, with West Indian members of the Socialist Party such as A. Philip Randolph and Richard Moore most prominent. They set up at 135^th Street and Lenox Avenue, which offered a wide sidewalk and a steady stream of passers-by coming to the surrounding stores or entering and exiting the subway station. Crowds numbering in the hundreds stopped to listen. Marcus Garvey made his debut in Harlem at that corner in 1916, and he and members of his organization, the UNIA, regularly spoke on the neighborhood’s streets throughout the 1920s.

Speakers Corners (Search Place="Speakers Corners")

By 1921, socialists could be found at other corners along Lenox Avenue, and on Sunday evenings, at 135^th Street and Seventh Avenue. Later in the 1920s, speakers also set up along Seventh Avenue, as it rather than Lenox became Harlem’s main street.  In the 1930s, speakers could be found on both avenues as far south as 115^th Street and as far north as 144^th Street.

Hubert Harrison, Harlem’s most famous street speaker, began as a socialist, but became famous for his lectures discussing “philosophy, psychology, economics, literature, astronomy or the drama.” [1]  By the mid-1920s, he drew crowds numbering in the thousands.  A reporter exiting the Lafayette Theater on to Seventh Avenue one evening in 1926 encountered “one of the biggest street corner audiences that we have ever met,” an audience whose “faces were fixed on a black man who stood on a ladder platform, with his back to the avenue and the passing buses and his face to the audience who blocked the spacious sidewalk.” [2] It was Harrison, speaking on the theory of evolution.  Harrison died in 1927; no other orator demonstrated his learning or achieved his stature.  For listeners, even lesser street speakers represented an alternative to churches and middle-class organizations, a source of more radical ideas, less constrained by institutional authority.  On the street, speakers were accessible, available for sampling by residents out for a stroll or doing their shopping, who might not otherwise have had the time to seek out orators.  Middle-class critics complained of the ignorance of some speakers, of the misinformation they spread, of the racial hatred they aroused.

Street Corner Orator, 1938 (Morgan and Marvin Smith, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL)

In the later half of the 1920s, political orators were outnumbered by speakers selling medicine.  Many were East Africans, or West Indians posing as Africans, who attracted crowds with elaborate costumes and performances.  Journalist Lester Walton, who campaigned against such “quacks,” described them in terms that expressed his frustration at the credulity of his black neighbors, but also conveyed some sense of what drew in passers-by:

They lend a theatrical touch to their manipulations by dressing in gaudy costumes of supposedly foreign make, and attractively decorate the platform with multi-colored ribbons, bunting and the like.  Attention of pedestrians is first gained by performing a feat of magic, such as turning wine into water.  Next rheumatism or some other chronic disease is dwelt on and a cure, whose reliability is proclaimed beyond any question, is offered for what is represented to be an amazingly small price.” [3]

Not all those offering something for sale were black.  According to Walton, some of the medicine vendors were whites posing as American Indians. Whites were also among those selling things other than medicine. Edgar Grey reported that Gypsies returned to Harlem’s street corners between 1922 and 1924, establishing ‘shops of astrology,’ while another journalist encountered “a dingy Czechoslovak,” “a provincially dressed peasant [with] a beautifully colored parrot on his shoulder,” and “innumerable Gypsies,” all offering to tell his fortune or reveal a winning number.[4] The first speaker Walton heard in 1928 turned out to be selling a dream book.  Others collected funds for business enterprises: Hubert Julian, the black aviator, could be found in May 1925 at 140^th Street and Seventh Avenue selling razors donated to him to pay for the plane he hoped to fly across the Atlantic.

In the 1930s, political speakers returned to prominence, and appeared in new locations, particularly on 125^th Street, in the vicinity of Harlem’s major white-owned businesses.  From there, they played a significant role in mobilizing support for campaigns to force white retailers to hire black staff, increasingly speaking on behalf of organizations and at regular times and places. Some, however, also drew on the appeals employed by medicine sellers.  Sufi Abdul Hamid, who arrived in Harlem in 1932, fresh from a successful campaign to win jobs for blacks in Chicago, rallied residents dressed in a white turban, green shirt, black riding boots and a black crimson-lined cape.

[1] Pittsburgh Courier, December 31, 1927

[2] New York News, 1926, cited in Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations, 94

[3]  “Street Speaker Heralds Spring in Harlem,” World, March 23, 1928, 17M

[4]  Amsterdam News, March 30, 1927, 16; Amsterdam News, August 19, 1931, 9

Read Full Post »

Traffic Accidents in 1920s Harlem

In the mid-1920s, an average of almost ten people a day, including two children, suffered injuries in automobile accidents between 130th and 155^th Streets. Reports of those accidents regularly appear in the black press, and occasionally in The New York Times, and in some cases led to felony prosecutions that appear in the District Attorney’s Case Files.

Automobile Accidents (Search 'Type of Event=Automobile crash')

The accidents on this map are those reported in January and July 1925 and 1930, together with some prosecuted in other months of those years, and a handful of prominently reported incidents from other times. The largest number occurred on or near Lenox and Seventh Avenues.  Those two streets saw more traffic than any other roadway north of 59th Street, helped by people traveling to and from events at the Polo Ground and Yankee Stadium.  Public transport also ran on both avenues:  street cars traveled on Lenox from 116th to 148th Street (and on 125th and 135th Streets), and double-decker buses ran on Seventh from 110th to 155th Street.

"Many accidents are attributed to unpatrolled intersections in Harlem. Here school children are allowed to run across busy intersections unescorted" (1943) Photo by Gordon Parks, FSA (Library of Congress)

School children’s encounters with this traffic provoked particular concern. One of Harlem’s public schools, PS 89, was located on Lenox Avenue, and children walking to the neighborhood’s other schools also had to cross the busy avenues, often on their own.  Gordon Parks gave this photograph, which he took after this period, in 1943,  a caption that reflects the ongoing concern about that situation.

Accidents with Traffic Police Posts (Search 'Place=Traffic police post')

Harlem’s black leaders agitated for traffic police to be stationed at the most dangerous intersections.  Sometime around 1920, their efforts saw an officer stationed at 135th and Lenox, the most dangerous intersection, with others added at 138th and Lenox and 145th and Lenox.  Additional posts were added on 5th Avenue and Seventh Avenue in 1921 and 1924, and in 1925 officers were placed on 134th and 135th streets during school hours.  But by 1928, a columnist in the NY Amsterdam News reported only five posts in operation: on Lenox at 125th and 135th streets, and Seventh at 125th, 135th and 145th streets.  Moreover,  posts were only manned from 8.30 am to 6.30 pm, while traffic was often heaviest in the evenings, when crowds descended on Harlem’s nightlife.

Officer Reuben Carter Directing Traffic at Lenox and 135th St, 1925 --- Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

Traffic posts occupied a prominent position in images of Harlem because many were manned by black officers, with Reuben Carter the first and best known.  In March 1921, he was assigned to the post at 135th and Lenox, the heart of Harlem, next to the subway station by which many came to the neighborhood.  At 6 feet 2 inches tall, weighing 250 pounds, he became a symbol of what African Americans could achieve in New York City.  Columnist Lester Walton reported that for many months after he occupied the post, “Negroes lined the sidewalks to watch him ‘do his stuff’.”  What most engaged the crowd was the sight of a black man directing white drivers.  That image was confronting enough for whites that in 1926 the police department rejected Carter’s request to be transferred to the post at 125th St and Lenox Avenue, in the midst of the white business district.  By 1928, 3 of the 5 Harlem traffic posts were manned by black officers, with the exceptions being the two posts on 125th Street, where white officers held sway.

For all his symbolic power, Officer Carter, and his colleagues, could not control the traffic.  In fact, on at least one occasion, Carter was himself hit by a vehicle while at his post. Nor did the signal lights installed on the avenues in 1928 appear to help much; a misunderstanding of the signals was a common explanation given for crashes.

Given that most drivers, including all those driving public transport and most behind the wheel of taxis, were white, many crashes were interracial affairs. Some flared into confrontations that drew in bystanders. Such was the case one afternoon in June 1925, when a crosstown streetcar hit a black laborer named Thomas Emanuel as he tried to cross 145^th Street near Seventh Avenue. He apparently suffered only minor injuries, at least until he demanded an explanation from the white motorman.  What Emanuel got was an insult, sparking a fight in which the two men traded blows, another motorman joined in and countless bystanders followed suit.  Accompanied by a cacophony of swearing, screaming women and children, whistles and car horns, the crowd fought for twenty-five minutes, stopping traffic, until a police officer finally arrived.

Read Full Post »