Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [34]
During his time in Harlem, Malcolm was not directly involved in activities that could be described as political—rent strikes, picketing stores that refused to hire Negroes, registering black voters, and so forth. Yet to his credit, even at this stage in his life he was an extraordinary observer of people. In his description of one of his early forays into Harlem, he mentions the presence of communist organizers: “Negro and white canvassers sidled up alongside you, talking fast as they tried to get you to buy a copy of the Daily Worker: ‘This paperʹs trying to keep your rent controlled. . . . Make that greedy landlord kill them rats in your apartment. . . . Who do you think fought the hardest to help free those Scottsboro boys?’” Longtime Harlem residents had schooled Detroit Red about the neighborhood’s racial demography, an urban transformation that he later characterized as the “immigrant musical chairs game.” His own telling of that shift captured both the directness and the broad strokes of his style. New York’s earliest black neighborhoods, he explained, had been confined in lower Manhattan. “Then, in 1910, a Negro real estate man somehow got two or three Negro families into one Jewish Harlem apartment house. The Jews fled from that house, then from that block, and more Negroes came in to fill their apartments. Then whole blocks of Jews ran . . . until in a short time, Harlem was like it still is today—virtually all black.”
Malcolm’s impressions about the origins and evolution of black Harlem were only partially accurate. He correctly noted blacks’ northward movement within the island of Manhattan, but missed the larger forces that prompted it. At the heart of every community are its social institutions; black Harlem was formed largely from the migration of venerable black churches and organizations from lower Manhattan to above 110th Street. St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, founded in 1809 and a central institution for the African-American middle class, left Manhattan’s Tenderloin district on West 34th Street and constructed a beautiful new church—in early Gothic style—on West 134th Street in 1909. Abyssinian Baptist Church, also founded in the early nineteenth century, moved to West 138th Street in 1923, where it became for several decades the largest Protestant congregation in America. Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church had existed for a century prior to its relocation to 60 West 132nd Street. Many of these churches made large profits when they sold their downtown locations, and the relative cheapness of land in Harlem allowed them to buy up not only sites for new churches but also large blocks of real estate that were then rented out to Negroes who followed them north.
Public and privately owned apartment complexes also were centers of social interaction and cultural activity in the neighborhood. One prime example was the Dunbar Apartments, built in 1926-27 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Opened in 1928 and located between Seventh and Eighth avenues at West 149th and 150th streets, the Dunbar Apartments were designed as the first housing cooperative for blacks. The residences claimed many famous tenants, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Paul and Eslanda Robeson, and W. E. B. and Nina Du Bois. Harlem’s famous YMCA, a center for public lectures and cultural events, was located on West 135th Street and opened in 1933. These and hundreds of other institutions were part of the cultural bedrock of black Harlem.
Equally important to Harlem was the racial transformation of New York City. In 1910, only 91,700 blacks lived in metropolitan New York; 60,500 African