Chapter 5 - The Unmaking of the New Negro Mecca

Summary

This chapter addresses the potency of the idea of Harlem as a crucible for the formulation of Black modern cultural identity. By focusing on community politics during the 1920s, King rereads James Weldon Johnson’s representation of Harlem in Black Manhattan (1930) as a space of interracial comity and liberalism as a form of propaganda and myth-making. Written as the nation’s economic situation worsened, Black Manhattan functioned as cultural treatise that legitimized the Harlem Renaissance as well as the possibilities it held for urban Black America and the nation at large. King juxtaposes Johnson’s liberal image of Harlem with the lived experience of Harlemites’ encounters with police surveillance and violence, displacement of Black leisure life, as well as labor exploitation. In this way, the chapter challenges Johnson’s narrative of New York exceptionalism, without underestimating the significance that Harlem held for Johnson and many other Black elites during the advent of the Great Depression.