This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900-1950

by Jervis Anderson

Documents the migration of Blacks to Harlem at the turn of the century and chronicles Harlem's life and culture through their heyday in the 1920s to the neighborhood's decline in the 1950s

Genres: History

390 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[AlTonya · Rating 5 out of 5]

While reclassifying books isn’t the most stirring aspect of being a librarian, it can be when you come across diamonds in the rough like “This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait 1900-1950”. I started reading this book in the stacks, took it to my office and finally checked the thing out to finish it. Amazing stuff! As a writer, anytime I hear the words Harlem Renaissance I’m thinking of all the writers who created such amazing work during that period. This book spans so much more and covers so many aspects of Harlem from 1900-1950 in a way that few books I’ve read of this caliber manage to do. To say the work has inspired me doesn’t even scratch the surface of all that I’ve learned and felt while reading it.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully constructed survey of the people, places and events that made Harlem Harlem from 1900 to 1950. Though it probably only dents the surface of the complexity of the society and its denizens, for a neophyte it is a wonderful book from which to discover why and how Harlem moved into prominence, not only for blacks but, artistically and musically, for much of white society as well. Dichotomies all over this book - like the Cotton Club didn't allow blacks through its doors and light colored blacks segregated themselves from darker skin all the time - highlight the layers and layers of societal constructs that were being challenged, and ignored, by young, dark upstarts. And young, light upstarts. And white people.

Anderson does a remarkable job of making this survey readable and enjoyable. There is very little of his voice (though when it pops up it jabs the reader in the side with a persnickety insistence) but enough personality to make this less of a dry who-begat-whom history and more of a colorful account of a lost world. Anderson uses as many personal accounts of the time to bring the sounds, textures and colors of Harlem to life as he possibly can and though this technique sometimes gives the narrative a stop-start-stop feel, most times it works beautifully.

[John Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quality read that is a lot of small essays intertwined into a book on the rise and fall of black cultural Harlem. As a political scholar of the Harlem organization Would have liked more politics less books, poetry, music, theatre discussion.

[Luke]

Pub 1982