1920 (43 page)

BUT IT IS MUSIC THAT
first comes to mind when one thinks of the Harlem Renaissance, the music that was played at places like Connie's Inn, Small's Paradise, or the Savoy, later to be memorialized in the song “Stompin' at
the Savoy”—and the neighbors weren't happy about any of it. According to the
Amsterdam News
, “The idea of taking a residential community and making it the raging hell it is after dark is something that should arrest the attention of even ministers of the gospel.” Years later, Edward Kennedy Ellington, known to all as “Duke,” would concede the point that Harlem could get noisy late at night, but “there was another part of it that was wonderful. That was the part out of which came so much of the only true American art—jazz music.”

The premier Harlem night spot was the Cotton Club, whose principal owner was Owney “The Killer” Madden, perhaps Prohibition's most vicious, soulless gun for hire. But also, somehow, one of its most tasteful impresarios of after-hours entertainment. First purchased in 1920 by the controversial black heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson and known then as the Club Deluxe, it passed into Madden's hands three years later. Under “The Killer,” it quickly became “synonymous,” said entertainer Cab Calloway, “with the greatest Negro entertainment of the twenties and thirties.” For four years, beginning in 1927, after rising from the basement of a tiny midtown bistro in 1920, Ellington and his band were the house musicians at Chez Madden, and the Duke stood apart from the crowd before he even sat at the piano. He was “[e]legant, reserved without being stiff, articulate even in his evasions, well mannered to the point of ostentation, elitist despite his populist tendencies.”

All of which meant that person and place were a perfect match. “This was no ordinary nightclub,” writes Ellington biographer John Edward Hasse. “Printed programs announced the musical songs and sketches and identified the vocal and dance soloists. In time, the programs grew more high toned in their language. One from 1931 noted, ‘Entr'acte: Dance to the strains of the incomparable Duke Ellington and His Record Artists.'”

The artists sat on a stage that was made to look like the veranda of a Southern plantation from a century or more earlier. There was even “a backdrop painted with weeping willows and slave quarters.” The appropriateness was eerie. For although black faces filled the stage, white faces, and white faces only, comprised the audience at the Cotton Club. Madden and his partners allowed no African-Americans to enter, stationing “brutes at the door” to make sure of it. And Ellington, generally
regarded as more a gentleman's gentleman than a black activist, was slow to anger about the policy when Madden's representatives first approached him. Says biographer Hasse:

However Ellington felt about it, he must have decided that the advantages of working there outweighed the disadvantages. He was always a practical man who maintained his personal dignity and realized when to play the sly fox. After all, the Cotton Club promised a prestigious venue with steady work, good money, new kinds of experiences from which to learn, lots of opportunities for exposure to the press and other influential people, not to mention pretty young women who danced and sang in the show. How could he not accept [Madden's] offer?

But within months of accepting the offer, Ellington began to reach his full bloom as an artist, a man with gifts so unique as a composer and arranger that they are hard to categorize, and crowd appeal so great that he became the leading musical figure of the Harlem Renaissance. As a result, he was able in time to use “his influence to have the owners admit light-complexioned blacks, local black entertainers, and his own mother and father, after they moved to Harlem.”

SOME OF THE WHITE CLIENTELE
who initially made up the entire audience of the Cotton Club, and partial audiences of other clubs nearby, were Jewish investors who, in 1920, sensed the rise of black culture as it was beginning to stir, and as a result were most responsible for the refurbishing of Harlem, its rise from ghetto to hot spot. It was they, more than anyone else, to whom Garvey owed his gratitude for the neighborhoods he found so appealing. Most of the investors were surely more interested in the return on their money than in increasing prominence for black art, but in the end it didn't matter. In the end the effect was the same.

Most notable among Harlem's Jewish benefactors were members of the Spingarn family, among the greatest of American philanthropists at the time, and whose paterfamilias, the notoriously aloof Joel Elias Spingarn, served for a while as the chairman of the board of the NAACP.
After having lost his bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican four years earlier, Spingarn served in 1912 as a delegate to the Progressive Party convention. That was the year when the group was also known as the Bull Moose Party, named after their presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, who claimed he was “feeling like a bull moose” despite having been denied the Republican nomination a month or so earlier. It was also a year in which Spingarn tried to add a statement condemning racial discrimination to the Progressive platform. He failed. A delegate again in 1916, and reading the zeitgeist more pragmatically, he didn't even try. Still, by himself, he succeeded nobly in battling racism.

The other major financier behind the cause of a thriving Harlem was Julius Rosenwald. The head of Sears, Roebuck and Company, his primary philanthropic interest was the establishment of schools for African-American children in the South, to which he donated millions of dollars of matching funds. Rosenwald also contributed more than $5 million to build Chicago's grand Museum of Science and Industry and spent five years as its president. As for his Harlem funding, the exact total is not known, but it too is in the millions.

The result of primarily Jewish funding was that Lenox and Seventh Avenues in Harlem became “the nightclub capital of the world.” According to historian Lloyd Morris, “Long after the cascading lights of Times Square had flickered out, these boulevards were ablaze. Lines of taxis and private cars kept driving up to the glaring entrances of the nightclubs. Until nearly dawn the subway kiosks poured crowds on the sidewalks. The legend of Harlem by night—exhilarating and sensuous, throbbing to the beating of drums and the waling [sic] of saxophones, cosmopolitan in its peculiar sophistications—crossed the continent and the ocean.”

AMONG THOSE OF SHALLOWER POCKETS
than Spingarn and Rosenwald, but whose contributions still proved significant, were many who not only invested their money in Harlem but spent it there several nights a week. Seeking relief from days of unyielding stress on Wall Street, they found it where they had least expected: in the exotic presence of another race and the sultry jazz that always seemed to accompany the dark, elegant women gliding around them, sometimes making eye contact, sometimes
not bothering. The men who accompanied them, or just looked longingly at them, were lean and handsome, attired like visiting dignitaries. It might almost have been another country, the night a short vacation in a culturally remote land.

Perhaps the majority of Harlem-frequenting whites were young jivesters and homosexuals, who felt more welcome among the openly gay artists of northern Manhattan, especially the elite writers, than they did anywhere else in New York. They might have to save their money for a night on the town, and it might take a few weeks to do so, but their pleasure in having a place like Harlem in which to dispense it made all the scrimping worthwhile.

If they were lucky, they might have seen Bessie Smith, who made her name in Harlem before she made it even bigger on the radio. Blessed with a voice as powerful as it was versatile, she was to female jazz singers what Louis Armstrong was to male vocalists—as he would occasionally put aside his horn and make that distinctly graveled voice of his into an instrument. The uniqueness of his sound on the trumpet and the sound of his vocal cords made an unparalleled combination.

But the packed audiences would also have been lucky to hear Mamie Smith, no relation. In 1920, most popular music was banal and unmemorable. Among the more successful tunes were “Daddy, You've Been a Mother to Me,” “When the Moon Shines on the Moonshine,” and “Who Ate Napoleons with Josephine When Bonaparte Was Away,”—and the lack of sophistication in the titles is a perfect complement to the melodies. All of these songs enjoyed brief spurts of popularity before descending to the oblivion that was their fate from the beginning.

But somehow, Mamie Smith, African-American through and through, became the first of her race to find a place on the very top of the charts. Starring in a musical revue in Harlem that summer, she found a spare afternoon to cut a record with her favorite background group, the Jazz Hounds. Their song, “Crazy Blues,” is regarded as the first jazz record ever released, instrumental or vocal. It went on sale on August 20 and somehow broke through the morass of hokum melodies and bunkum lyrics to become the top-selling number of the entire year, with more than 100,000 copies eventually being purchased. Not only did the song
not
later pass into oblivion, but in 1994 it was inducted into the Grammy
Hall of Fame. A year later it was chosen to be permanently preserved in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. That it achieved its stature in a year like 1920 was something of a miracle.

Mamie Smith, who would later star in a number of films, sang with restraint, but it was hard-won, and her tones were those of a woman who had been undeniably wronged.

Now I can read his letters

I sure can't read his mind

I thought he's lovin' me

He's leavin' all the time

Now I see my poor love was blind.

Now I got the crazy blues

Since my baby went away

I ain't got no time to lose

I must find him today.

THE FEW PEOPLE WHO WANTED
to see Paul Robeson perform in 1920 were not so lucky. He was acting then, not singing, and doing little of the former.

Robeson was one of the first blacks to attend law school at Columbia University, which stands on the southern edge of Harlem. A poor young man, he could afford the tuition only by playing professional football on the weekends: “for the Hammond (Indiana) Pros in 1920, the Akron Pros in 1920 and 1921, and the Milwaukee Badgers in 1922. He was paid between $50 and $200 per game. Although Robeson was one of the pioneer players of the National Football League, his career as a professional football player has been largely ignored by professional-football historians.”

But a few months before the 1920 football season began, when the new Harlem YMCA opened, Robeson was asked to take part in the commemoration ceremony, starring in
Simon the Cyrenian
, by Ridgely Torrence, a white man strongly supportive of African-American art. “The play was about an Ethiopian who steps out of a crowd to help a tired and haggard Jesus Christ carry his cross up Calvary Hill to be crucified,” writes Eugene H. Robinson, not a biographer of Robeson but a student of his work. “His
role in this play was symbolic of his commitment to just causes and to oppressed people the world over, a dominant dimension of his life.”

By the time the twenties ended, thanks in part to starring in one of many successful productions of Eugene O'Neill's
The Emperor Jones
, Robeson was on his way to becoming the leading black male performer of his generation, singer as well as actor. In the 1936 film version of
Show Boat
, the classic musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, Robeson played the dock worker Joe, who gave audiences of all races chills and heartache when he sang the show's most famously wrenching song, “Ol' Man River.” Later, Robeson would record an inferior rendition of the number—in dance tempo, of all things—with Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, which might best be categorized as a group of semi-jazz musicians. For some reason, it was the Robeson version with Whiteman that was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2006, two years after “Crazy Love” had arrived. But, under Whiteman's baton, Robeson sounds as if he is singing a soulful cha-cha, assuming there could ever be such a thing.

One of the most extraordinary public figures of the twentieth century, Paul Robeson was as controversial as he was talented. Openly a communist, he insisted that the reason for his affiliation was capitalism's treatment of the African-American. In 1942, he met privately but forcefully with Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of major league baseball, a meeting “that ultimately led to Jackie Robinson's breaking down the barrier of Jim Crow and unleashing events that were to change the face of sports—and the nation.”

A later meeting with President Truman did not go as well. Robeson demanded anti-lynching laws. Truman replied, in effect, that no one was in a position to make demands to the Chief Executive of the United States, no matter what the cause; and at that point a White House guard was summoned to show Robeson the door. He did not need the escort, departing with head held high, shoulders back, his belief that he was in the right unchallenged.

Robeson held to his politically incorrect positions on the Spanish Civil war, fascism, and imperialism—held to them, insisted on them, spoke out for them. He was not a shouter, not a posturer, and did not need to be; when he spoke, his presence alone was enough to command attention. In the McCarthy era, he would be blacklisted for his politics but remained
uncowed, his dignity intact. He was the white man's most looming nightmare: a powerful, talented, and intelligent African-American who would not back down from anyone who stood in the way of his people's progress.

Later, during the most controversial war of the twentieth century, it was Muhammad Ali who became famous, and eventually imprisoned, for refusing military service by saying: “I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” But thirteen years earlier, in 1954, several years before the Vietnam War began, with French participation rather than American, Robeson had expressed the same sentiment more elegantly. Perhaps it was he who gave Ali the idea. “Shall Negro sharecroppers from Mississippi,” Robeson asked, “be sent to shoot down brown-skinned peasants in Vietnam—to serve the interests of those who oppose Negro liberation at home and colonial freedom abroad?”