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By Root 438 0

born of resourcefulness and created by financial necessity. Given on Saturday or Thursday nights, the traditional days off for maids and other domestics, the fetes were designed to augment slim incomes while providing cheap entertainment for those who would not have been allowed to cross the thresholds of the famous clubs even if they could afford to. Rent gouging of newly arrived blacks meant that rents in Harlem averaged fifteen to thirty dollars a month higher than those in other areas of Manhattan. An individual who couldn’t “make the rent” on an apartment would hold such a shindig, print up handbills, and set up shop. The handbills often featured rhyming couplets:

You don’t get nothing for being an angel child,

So you might as well get real busy and real wild

Or

If you can’t do the Charleston or the do the pigeon wing,

You sure can shake that thing.

As the parties became more prevalent, hosts and hostesses often advertised the Southern culinary specialties that would be sold.

Ribbon Maws and Trotters a Specialty

Fall in Line and Watch Your Step,

For there’ll be a lot of browns with plenty of pep at

A Social Whist Party

Given by Lucille & Minnie

149 West 117 Street, N.Y. GR. Floor, W,

Saturday Evening, Nov. 2nd 1929

Furniture was cleaned out, chairs borrowed from a local funeral parlor, and voilà. The lights were turned down low, with a red or blue bulb added for atmosphere. A pickup band of out-of-work musicians was usually available, and a spread of Southern fare was set out. Items such as pigs’ feet, Hoppin’ John, ham hocks and cabbage, okra gumbo, sweet potato pone, and the tomato-infused rice that is called “mulatto rice” in Savannah might be served along with the ever-present fried chicken. Soon, someone was guaranteed to start singing, and a good time was had by all. A nominal fee was charged, and if the tenant was lucky, at evening’s end there would be enough in the till to pay the rent for another month. Harlem Renaissance poet and writer Langston Hughes recalled:

The Saturday Night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any night club, in small apartments where God knows who lived—because the guests seldom did—but where the piano would often be augmented by a guitar, or an odd coronet, or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the street. And where awful bootleg whiskey and good fried fish or steaming chitterlings were sold at very low prices. And the dancing and singing and impromptu entertaining went on until dawn came in at the windows.

The rent parties were another side of the entrepreneurial impulse. Some grew into regular events and even grew into mini clubs and clandestine temporary restaurants.

Harlem, like much of the African American world of the time, also had its class divide. While the mass of people worked daily at small jobs and menial tasks as domestics and laborers, there were also those exceptional people who had growing power, prestige, and wealth. The black political views of how the African American community little more than fifty years from enslavement would grow and prosper were divided between the ideas of two men: W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.

A seminal figure of the period, Du Bois was a Northerner who grew up in Massachusetts. He was educated at Fisk University, one of the historically black institutions of higher learning that had sprung up in the South post-Emancipation. Later, he became the first black man to be awarded a Harvard doctorate and also pursued graduate study in Germany. Du Bois argued that the “Talented Tenth,” the educationally and socially advantaged 10 percent of the Community, would rise and “pull all that are worthy of saving up to their vantage ground” and held that a liberal arts education for that segment of the population was the key to African American success.

At the opposite cultural pole of the black world was Booker T. Washington, the other great black statesman of the period. His work provided contrast to that of Du Bois, as did his life. Washington had been born enslaved