*“I found myself wondering if this was the right place—if, indeed, this was Harlem at all.”* —Rudolph Fisher, 1927
At the intersection of West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, new Harlem is trying to swallow up old Harlem. Next to a space-age Whole Foods on the southwest corner of the junction, a Jamaican trader sells venereal disease ointments no less than six days a week. (On the seventh day, he rests.) While Columbia-bound commuters might shuffle into the Amazon-owned chain grocer for heirloom tomatoes and artisanal kombuchas, he sits, stands, smokes, and serenades passersby with greetings and patois-wrapped endorsements like, “Health is wealth now, not shoes and clothes.” Wedged between an incense peddler and a newsstand, his wares include “Herp X,” a quick fix to “stop herpes outbreaks” through its potent combination of “super liquid food” and “rapid healing.”
Above the Whole Foods, there’s a Burlington Coat Factory next to a Raymour & Flanigan furniture store. Across the street, a CVS is under a Marshalls, with a Trader Joe’s on the way. One corner has a Starbucks beside a check-cashing joint and a dull AT&T outlet. Within a stone’s throw, there is a Chipotle, a Checkers, and a Wingstop to boot. Billie Holiday used to sing at a hole in the wall on the southeast side of the intersection; today, it’s occupied by a Wells Fargo branch that resembles a Scandinavian doomsday bunker.
Both 125th and Lenox were renamed in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement—125th after Dr. King and Lenox for Malcolm X—though I have yet to meet anyone in my years living here who refers to the former as such and isn’t white. To the descendants of those who remade them, where these streets cross is simply the Corner.
On one end, Malcolm once rapped to pedestrians atop a raised platform. On another, Marcus Garvey paraded past in full military regalia. Folks rioted (and threw bricks at patrolmen from the rooftops) back in ’43, and they tore it up all over again in the ruckus of ’64 (found new bricks and threw those too). Some are gone, others have stayed—the wandering people of this hollow, adopted land. With as much awe as sadness, I sometimes stand on the Corner as sheer refusal, desperation, faith, and force of habit mix to allow a place to keep on living, as its heart is ripped out of it.
I came for the ghosts. You tend not to admit that publicly both because it’s a little gauche and also a little too close to sounding like someone’s in the market for a Ouija board. I don’t play that—though I did come to Harlem for something resembling spiritual clarity. The idea of an afterlife has never really convinced me, but I do believe in my ancestors: their glory, their pain, their tenderness, their shortcomings, their love, their fear, and their joy. That they may or may not have lived *for me*, but that in my every breath and thought they may exist *through me*.
This is another way of saying that I often do a thing where I think that I owe it to them to live a life worthy of theirs. I am from many kinds of people, but most of them struggled magnificently, and whatever shame resides in this truth was never ours to bear. My closest approximation of faith is that it would seem a tremendous waste if my folks outlasted whatever they were running from—or reached wherever they were running to—just for me to idle in their wake.
I came to Harlem hoping that there would be something in its movements, its vibrations, its essence that would push and prod me. That in the chosen capital of that first generation of Black people in this country who eyed a map and claimed, en masse, somewhere else—their own place, a new home—I might find and channel what it is, exactly, that they were looking for.
The unmistakable truth of Harlem, as it stands today, is that as a touchstone, a community, an improbable inheritance, it is indisputably and fundamentally imperiled. This much you can see and feel on its avenues and boulevards—and nowhere more so than the Corner.
That Harlem finds itself molar deep in the maw of gentrification is not exactly hot type. From the early 1940s through the late 1980s, Central Harlem—which covers most of what was then regarded as “Negro” Harlem—had a Black population that never dipped below 90 percent. In the 1990s, that figure dropped into the low 80s. By the 2010s, it fell below two-thirds for the first time in nearly 100 years. In 2021, the figure was 44.2 percent. (In the same time period, Central Harlem’s white population has bloomed from nonexistent to the single digits to, now, the upper teens.)
This kind of upheaval is not truly unique in this [city](https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/in-brooklyn-americas-gentrification-epicenter-building-on-a-model-for-commu), this [state](https://buffalonews.com/opinion/another-voice-gentrification-and-displacement-in-buffalo-are-real-problems/article_1890fd40-651f-11ed-9413-b3b778bb7ce2.html), or this [time zone](https://whyy.org/series/gentrified-stories-rapidly-changing-philadelphia/). Across the fruited plain, [white Americans are returning to urban areas](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2023/us-city-white-population-increase/) at rates unseen since they doomed and ditched them for the suburbs. Harlem is not the sole example of a Black enclave that is being essentially pushed off the map, but—by virtue of its singular rise and its singular fall—from whatever bent you approach it, it is the thorniest one. The Mecca, as we know it, was not started on the Corner, but there, now, its dissolution has assuredly begun.
Catch me a block east of Lenox in a building that once was a real estate office, then was a hardware store, and is now a brightly painted Shake Shack. Claudette Brady, who devotes her time to preserving Harlem—its structures, its architecture, its history—was the one who suggested the venue. A Jamaica-born Brooklynite, Brady tells me she sees her home borough as a cautionary record. “You look at downtown Brooklyn,” she says, shaking her head, “I don’t recognize it anymore.”
Brady works in Harlem for a local nonprofit called Save Harlem Now!, devoted to increasing the number of historical districts and landmark-protected buildings across the neighborhood. The association was formed in 2015 by a group of residents worried by a spate of demolitions in the area: an entertainment complex developed communally by West Indian migrants; the club where Malcolm X chilled back when he called himself [Detroit Red](http://web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/malcolmx/growing.html)—the one with regulars ranging from Langston Hughes to Miles Davis. Today, only 3.7 percent of Harlem’s buildings are landmarked. In the Upper West and East Sides, which transitioned [from partial](https://ny.curbed.com/2014/2/20/10141822/how-the-upper-east-side-grew-out-of-three-historic-enclaves) [ethnic enclaves](https://nymag.com/news/features/47182/) to majority-white neighborhoods, the number reached 50 percent in early 2023. In Greenwich Village, with its [own history of tumult and change](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/realestate/living-in-greenwich-village.html), it’s 66, around 20 times more common than in Harlem. The city conveys historic status by installing [brown street signs](https://untappedcities.com/2013/03/05/the-history-of-nycs-street-signs/#) on approved blocks. “In the Village, you have to actually search for a green street sign,” Brady says. “Here, you got to search for the brown street sign.”
Some of the nonprofit’s work is centered on protests and picketing. Other times, it educates the public while formally lobbying elected officials. Brady often finds herself searching through property records to spot the stories sealed in the walls of endangered homes. Every block in each section is its own treasure trove. Music, politics, visual art, ballroom culture, poetry, and film: In Harlem, at its peak, there were no degrees of separation.
Brady admits there are times when the thought of what is forever buried in the wreckage of renewal and redevelopment leads her straight to bottomless grief. In a few decades, without resistance, it could look like all this Black life was never even here. If that might happen in Harlem, where is the place it could not? “I can’t think about it. If you think about what is lost,” Brady tells me, “it becomes overwhelming.”
Black Harlem, from the start, was not supposed to exist. The enclave was urbanized in the late 1800s for white Manhattan, with its upwardly mobile young renters and homebuyers in mind. When the arrival of the New York City Transit system to the area was delayed at the turn of the century, the housing market crashed. Units sat empty while white landlords worked up the stomach to try renting to a few Black families on 134th Street. Their arrival provoked a violent immune response. Migrants were stoned and stabbed and, in one case, threatened with hanging by a full-on mob. White Harlem refused Black Harlem, promising in their property association meetings to “drive them out” and “send them to the slums where they belong.”
On an almost weekly basis in those first few decades, the press referred to “a veritable flood,” a “rapid” shift, a “deluge” of migrants from the South and the Caribbean too. By the 1930s, Harlem had the largest contiguous population of Black people in the country. The trapdoor of Harlem as a haven for the entire African diaspora—the site of a [creative, social, and cultural renaissance—](https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/new-african-american-identity-harlem-renaissance)is that what allowed it to form doomed it all the same: Some Black Harlemites owned property, but more had to rent. By the time prices went up, they were hemmed into Harlem; there was nowhere else in New York for them to retreat. Absentee landlords and the [government](https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3145-benign-neglect-and-planned-shrinkage) left Harlem to rot.
“One of the things that people don’t realize,” Brady tells me, sipping a cup of cola, “is that by the end of the ’80s, the city owned a significant amount of property. The policy was pretty much to get us all out. And this would become the uptown hub for the middle class.” From this context, the current reconstitution of Harlem began. In the 1980s and ’90s, the city, state, and federal government passed laws ostensibly meant to ease the burden of homeownership in the area, but they depended on buyers to be upwardly mobile enough to purchase property to begin with. Today, in part because longtime residents couldn’t afford to buy in directly after [benign neglect](https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3145-benign-neglect-and-planned-shrinkage), rents are increasing in every section of Harlem.
From the late ’90s to the late aughts, housing prices increased by 247 percent in Central Harlem. Even now, more than a third of rental units in the area are unprotected from sudden price surges. In 2022 alone, rent increased more than 15 percent across the entire neighborhood. “Politically, you come to Harlem and say, ‘We’re going to build this affordable housing.’ And, of course, the question is always: ‘Affordable for who?’” Brady says. “Affordable housing in New York City is defined as up to 120 percent of area median income. So, yeah, you can say affordable housing. It’s still affordable for somebody who’s at 120 percent of median income, not the average person who lives here, who let’s just say \[makes\] 60 percent of median income.”
Add to this the [trend of rezoning](https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/12070-new-york-city-illusionary-zoning-housing#:~:text=The%20misuse%20of%20zoning%2C%20often,others%20inadequately%20housed%20or%20homeless.), the looming specter of [Columbia University as a real estate conglomerate](https://theunitedfrontagainstdisplacement.org/urban-core/columbia-university-moves-to-further-gentrify-harlem-residents-and-students-unite-in-opposition/), and a decrease in Harlem’s overall Black population, and you have a landscape of steady displacement. Within eyesight of where we’re meeting, the evidence of Harlem’s remaking is quite literally spread out in front of us: Across the street, there’s a concrete skeleton of a soon-to-open 20-story, 348-unit residential building; half a block south, there’s a row of remodeled brownstones, right above Marcus Garvey Park; half a block to the west, there’s a Nike outlet and a T.J. Maxx.
While we’re readying to leave, I mention to Brady that I’m not sure how much of what’s happening on the Corner—in all of Harlem—is about race in America or about how we accumulate capital.
“There is no dividing line,” she says. “Everybody says America’s greatest sin is slavery. Slavery is not a sin. The sin is greed.”
Until they were stolen, the plains of Harlem were called Muscoota, by their Lenape inhabitants. They were used for farming before land was made a possession. Every so often, the soil was likely refreshed by controlled and alternated burnings. This same fertility is what made it the invading Dutch West India Company’s object of desire. They arrived directly from Amsterdam in 1623, on the lower end of the island, with a chartered goal “to advance the peopling of those fruitful and unsettled parts.”
Within years, they reached the grounds surrounding what is now 124th Street. This first generation of European settlers often clashed with the bands of the native Lenape, whom the company had attacked. In the span of less than a decade, most of the Dutch who set off to the tip of the island for glory and tobacco profits had watched their homesteads burn.
The village was not established in full until 1658, when it was named Nieuw Haarlem and formed officially “for the further promotion of agriculture” and “the security” of their wider interests in the colony. To expand and enable a swift and efficient economic return, the chief executive of the Dutch West India Company promised “to employ negroes”—their stock of African slaves—“to assist” all of the village’s white inhabitants. This enslaved population put down roots in the area and was a defining force in commodifying these stolen lands. They built a wagon road by hand, following a Native path, all the way from Harlem to lower Manhattan.
After the British took over in 1664, the scale of bondage increased on the island. By 1669, landowners had established their own private supply of enslaved people: That year, a Dutch planter took out an ad in the local newspaper in search of an unnamed captive who’d “run away from his Master’s service” in Harlem. “The Negro is big and tall, about 25 or 26 years old,” the ad said, “and went away from his Master four or five days since.” In 1790—after American independence—there were 115 enslaved people present in the still extremely rural district. In addition to enslaved laborers, Harlem had a thriving freeborn and formerly enslaved Black population. They came to the area of their own volition. They worked. They went to church. They built homes.
When the major farming outfits moved out of Manhattan, Harlem was recast as a vacation ground for the wealthy, but a few longtime Black residents carved out lives in this newly gilded landscape. They found employment as servants, cleaners, and groundskeepers. As Harlem began to urbanize and be recast as impenetrably white, they refused to abandon what had once been their haven. The “[colored graveyard](https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/african-burial-ground-harlem/)” was plowed right over, with the bones still in it. The hills were leveled. The plains and creeks filled in.
Elegant brownstones were constructed overlooking most blocks. “The average Harlemite,” a reporter noted in 1890, “is in a continuous swim of development.” Near what would come to be known as the Corner, they built an opera house and put racial covenants on home deeds. Though the land had long been tilled by diligent Black hands, homeownership there was restricted to an invented ancestry, the so-called “Caucasian race.”
There is a single constant in the existence of Harlem as first a colonial and then an American creation: people being moved, lured, and prodded in and out of this place. The Dutch tried and failed to eradicate the native Lenape—on at least one occasion, they slaughtered them en masse as they slept. Pious farmers arrived from the Netherlands and died with conquest and profit on their minds. Africans were imported, used, and discarded for mere [guilders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_guilder), [pounds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_pound), and dollars. Their free children were pushed aside, as were their bones. Harlem is a vision as much as a place, in all of its incarnations; and in all of its incarnations, there is always, somehow, a catch.
The man has neither bean pie nor bow tie. Brother Lonnie of the Nation of Islam—Temple No. 7, [Malcolm’s child](https://writlarge.ctl.columbia.edu/view/404/)—stands on the northwest point of the Corner, with words to [lay the foundation for a kind of Black nation](https://new.finalcall.com/2023/10/24/laying-the-foundation-for-our-own-black-nation/) at his side. He braves the mid-November chill in a charcoal wool overcoat, jet-black rimless sunglasses, and a pair of thin, black leather gloves. They give him enough dexterity to thumb through a stack of the Nation’s most recent volume of [*The Final Call*](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Final-Call-The), their propaganda of choice in the image of their [previous propaganda](https://daily.jstor.org/occ-reveal-digital-muhammad-speaks/) of choice, which was modeled after [another propaganda](https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84037003/) of choice entirely.
“What you need, brother? How you doing?” he asks me, lifting his chest like a current had just run down his spine. “Here, take one, you can read it.”
Born and raised in Harlem, the righteous brother is one of a number of Nation congregants who regularly circulate their official newspaper among the 160,000 pedestrians who frequent the Corner every week. During the Nation’s heyday, their ranks in the neighborhood reached at least 5,000. Here, as in other urban locales, the Nation has always managed to not just incorporate but reflect the appeals of a steadfast faith—[however flawed](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/nation-of-islam/555332/)—in a land of false promises. In rain, snow, heat, sleet, and hail, they are still a regular presence at the intersection. The crowds, Brother Lonnie tells me, haven’t necessarily shrunk, but they damn sure don’t look the same. “The neighborhood has changed because of the gentrification. They have no respect,” he says. We both glance at the Whole Foods hovering directly behind us.
“They’ve been doing this,” he continues, holding that last word on the tip of his tongue as a divine reptile might. “They’ve been gentrifying for 15 years. They come in here and they buy themselves a brownstone …”
A true disciple, Brother Lonnie paces while he speechifies, brightly grinning as he struts his metaphysical stuff:
“... and they’ll try to smile with you.”
He floats like an [Asiatic](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv1v7zbv8.38?seq=2) butterfly and leans forward like a beaming, blessed bee.
His lips curl as he sticks the landing, ending with: “They’ll try to be as if they’re your friend.”
When he’s fishing for converts on the Corner, his honorifics of choice are *brother*, *sister*, *ma’am*, a heartful *assalamu alaikum*, and an even more wholehearted *hello*.
“We should boycott the store and stop going in there,” he intones. “That’s the power we got, but you know you’ll still go in and support them and give them your money. It’s all messed up.”
It’s in the scripture, he tells me—open King James to John 8:44: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do …”
“It’s the system, brother,” he croons out of the side of his mouth. “They have us programmed and conditioned. They have us programmed and conditioned without realizing. You follow their way of lifestyle. They been doing it for 400 years, man. This is going back to slavery.”
“Of course they’re gonna come into our neighborhood.”
Before the Nation was on the Corner, it was a glimmer in a salesman’s eye. Wallace Fard brought woven silks and [hair like lamb’s wool](https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/REV.1.14-15) into Detroit before Motown, to a ghetto called [Paradise Valley](https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/paradise-valley). He was an itinerant trader. He knocked on doors. He bartered goods. He brought a story with his name.
Fard said if he was not a full prophet, then he was of a direct line. His followers whispered that he’d arrived from Mecca, but they were never truly certain from where exactly he had come. When Fard introduced himself throughout the district, he employed a profound spiritualism, a taciturn demeanor, and an innate knowledge of holy texts. This endeared him to the locals, for Detroit, like Harlem, was a basin of the devout southern migrant overflow. Pilgrims flocked to cities and towns that at once asked them to come and implored them to go—communities just as dependent on their new arrivals as they were repulsed by them.
To survive under the harsh [warmth of other suns](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/334851-i-was-leaving-the-south-to-fling-myself-into-the) often required an abiding faith from new arrivals.
Even as his skin was as pale as ivory, Fard referred to himself as a Black man. Like the soon-to-be converts, he said he was a member of a “once great” and now “wandering” tribe. In a city that utilized Black labor like cogs in a machine, Fard doled out belonging—spoke to his flock as a body of holy scientists. “He began teaching us knowledge of ourselves,” swore his chief follower, a Georgia-born autoworker once named Elijah Poole. “Of God and the devil, of the measurement of the Earth, of other planets, and of the civilization of some of the planets other than Earth.” In a fog of charisma, religion, philosophy, and mysticism, Fard showed them how to unlock their makings: He told them they were of and within Allah—not despite but because of their station.
It is this foundational precept that would later spawn the Nation of Islam. Fard opened a temple within a year of arriving in Detroit in 1930; a few years later, he closed it, left for Chicago, and then disappeared. His student, Elijah, stepped in to fill the vacuum, with a surname now changed to honor the Prophet Muhammad. He said that Fard had been Allah in material form and that he would now serve as Allah’s one and true messenger.
There is a way to sift through the wreckage of this story and unearth an object cracked at its foundation, a bargain blemished from the start. It does not take a cynic: Fard was a huckster. He fled Detroit only after police had (unlawfully) detained him and a few other followers in connection to a [highly publicized murder trial](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2768686). His temple’s title was so associated with the scandal, so soiled, that his most devoted subject—Elijah Muhammad, his apostle—altered the movement’s very name. The faith he birthed (an [amalgamation](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4139916) of [other beliefs](https://www.bu.edu/missiology/missionary-biography/a-c/blyden-edward-wilmot-1832-1912/) and [lore](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/14634/pdf), often [heretical to orthodox Islam](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263385508_The_Nation_of_Islam_and_the_Muslim_World_Theologically_Divorced_and_Politically_United)) was a perpetual magnet for U.S. intelligence attention and intervention. His teachings got Muhammad sent [to federal prison for four years](https://www.jstor.org/stable/24485888); they fueled the kinds of intrafaith conflicts that would eventually lead to [the murder of their most famous adherent](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/nyregion/mujahid-halim-malcolm-x.html); the Nation was and is socially conservative, homophobic, anti-science, and increasingly antisemitic, all of which is to say nothing of how it sidelines the women [who keep it afloat](https://www.aaihs.org/black-women-the-nation-of-islam-and-the-pursuit-of-freedom/) in the first place.
I do not believe that his followers were duped because I do not believe them capable of it. I think they knew, like many religious practitioners—like all those who chose to transcend one way of living for the hope of another one—that this was all too good to be true. By virtue of circumstance and survival instincts alone, these were uncommonly intelligent people, inclined toward embracing a new mythology, a rejection of the same deceitful tale. “We believe we are the people of God’s choice,” the Messenger phrased it. “The rejected and the despised.” One way or another, this world would always be a lie. Such is life for the rejected, the surely wretched of the earth.
They chose to put their faith in a different lie first.
Harlem took less than 20 years to fill with crowds likewise dumped and despised. In its early years, it existed as a city as it did in the popular mind: first as a blank slate and a place of potential genesis and then as the launching pad of [a “New Negro”](https://daily.jstor.org/the-new-negro-and-the-dawn-of-the-harlem-renaissance/) people, a staging ground for a form of rebirth. These waves of exodus and convergence were felt more often than they were named, and they stretched far beyond the cadre of creators lionized in [retroactive appraisals of the Harlem Renaissance](https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-harlem-renaissance-and-transatlantic-modernism). In the 1920s, Black ministers and newspapers advocated for the buying and leasing of property in Harlem. The renderings of its promise were immense: The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr. crowned Harlem a “symbol of liberty and the Promised Land,” not just to Black Americans, but “to Negroes everywhere.” James Weldon Johnson, the [master historian](https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/civil-rights-leaders/james-weldon-johnson#:~:text=A%20key%20figure%20of%20the,as%20the%20Black%20national%20anthem.) and writer of the Negro national anthem, went so far as [predicting in the early 1920s](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23162615?seq=1), “It will be the greatest Negro city in the world.” It was hailed as a “race capital” by Alain Locke, the [Dean of the Renaissance](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/21/alain-locke-harlem-renaissance). By the end of the decade, *The New York Times* had begun referring to the neighborhood as “Little Africa.”
Harlem was no mere safe haven; it had morphed into an emblem of the race. “Only Negroes belong in Harlem,” wrote the activist and writer Eslanda Goode Robeson. “It is a place they can call home.” W. E. B. Du Bois’s message in the NAACP magazine *The Crisis* echoed those same thoughts: “White onlookers … must be made to remember that Harlem is not merely exotic, it is human. It is not a spectacle and an entertainment, it is life; it is not chiefly cabarets, it is chiefly home.” Langston Hughes complained a decade later about “the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown,” who would “stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in a zoo.” By 1938, the Black press in the area was writing headlines like, “WHITE WOMEN MUST STAY OUT,” with the subhead, “Stay out of Harlem. It’s no place for you.”
The rise of Black Harlem is joined at the hip with a strain of ecstatic worship, one not unlike what powered the birth of the Nation of Islam. It could never be just that the area might be a refuge for a people pushed from place to place—Harlem was a promise, a refutation, a kind of providence. It was a chosen land in a world of chosen fews.
And yet the harbingers of ensnarement were there even in the transplantation pattern. In the ’30s, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier found that the arrival of Black migrants to Harlem had already shown signs of coinciding “with the degree of physical deterioration” in particular areas. While Harlem may have gradually opened up for Black renters due to a lack of white demand, that opening soon coincided with extreme hikes in rent. In a 1925 hearing, a municipal court judge described an environment where “it is common for colored tenants in Harlem to pay twice as much as white tenants for the same apartments.”
And while these price increases worsened the burden on Black Harlemites, they also coincided with their wide-scale exclusion from the rest of the New York City rental market—a practice so exploitative that it led the city tenement house commissioner to admit in 1937, “We all know there is discrimination.” Even as Harlem became an all-Black residential entity, luminaries like the writer Claude McKay lamented the lack of Black ownership: “The saloons were run by the Irish, the restaurants by the Greeks, the ice and fruit stands by the Italians, and the grocery and haberdashery stores by the Jews.” With landlords who lived away from the community by the late ’20s, studies called the deteriorating conditions “unfit for human occupancy.” One chairman of a city housing reform committee actually said out loud, “The state would not allow cows to live in some of these apartments.”
To afford to live in derelict buildings at slum-boom rates, “rent parties,” offering an apartment unit for an event, became a regular occurrence. Folks were inhabiting unfinished cellars and coal bins and sleeping on pallets, one toilet serving four apartments with multiple families each. The tuberculosis rate in Harlem in the 1930s was nearly six times the city’s overall rate. Women died more often in childbirth in Harlem than anywhere else in New York, and the general death rate in Harlem was twice as high as the whole of New York City. It is impossible to account for Harlem as a conspired slum without understanding what its victims were promised, why they kept arriving deep into the 20th century, and why so many stayed. When the Corner was burning and James Baldwin challenged his countrymen to “walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become,” the tragedy was as much about the physical ruin as it was about the dream that never could quite take. After all of that living and shrinking and loving and grinding—to have all of that be removed, remodeled, and redefined today is to always know you’ve lost a piece of yourself but to never know exactly which.
Until his dying days, Elijah Muhammad remained a faithful envoy of the teachings of the man he once called God. Around a week before his death, in 1975, he was still scheduled to headline the Nation’s annual commemoration of Fard. When he passed, a few days later, the group issued a nearly four-paragraph-long statement. It took 143 more words than he would have used to say, “The Messenger has returned to Allah.”
On a bitterly cold Wednesday, after the first real snowfall in the city, I met Joe Baker at his third-floor walk-up in the Upper East Side. Baker, a gregarious polymath, is a part of the White Turkey family and a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, the main body of Lenape in the United States. In 2009, he cofounded the Lenape Center, a nonprofit devoted to maintaining Lenape culture and art and enabling a return to Lenapehoking—their ancestral territory, stretching from lower Delaware to the Hudson River Valley, as well as the island we [mistakenly call](https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/16790/anth_Manhattan.pdf) Manhattan.
Born and raised in Oklahoma, Baker can trace his ancestry all the way back to the 1600s. While he didn’t grow up visiting New York City, his family made sure to reinforce their ties to the Northeast. The first time he visited the area was in 1978—he was in an off-Broadway show—and the experience gave him “a sense of homecoming but also a profound sense of … haunting.”
Working as an artist, educator, and curator, he began to frequent the city on a more regular basis. On one visit, he and another Lenape Center cofounder had been walking through the island and talking about the lack of Lenape presence in a city with almost 200,000 Native inhabitants. “There was this awareness that Lenape was not talked about. You never heard anyone speak of the Lenape,” Baker told me, in his sunny, southern-facing apartment. “It just all of a sudden hit me that we had to do something or we would be forever erased.”
Baker gives an example: “When I was growing up, there were still fluent speakers of Lenape language that I was around as a child and my early adult years,” he says, a scarf wrapped loosely around his neck. “My great-grandmother who spoke almost entirely Lenape, I have memories of very early in my life. And also at those community gatherings, the dances, the Lenape elders would be in conversation, but there are no fluent speakers today.” Particularly given the looming presence of Native boarding schools, he remembers life within his family and the wider community as in some ways shaped by “the pressure to assimilate and assimilate in order to survive.”
The number of oil strikes on Lenape allotment lands complicated matters even further, another tragic illustration of how the tolls of displacement can stretch beyond immediate departures alone. Bartlesville, a 30-minute drive from the Osage County seat of Pawhuska, was impacted by some of the same [anti-Native violence](https://www.pbs.org/filmfestival/films/osage-murders) as the [People of the Middle Waters](https://www.nps.gov/articles/osage.htm). “That very much was the tension of my family,” Baker tells me, “and growing up there.” Twelve years before he was born, his uncle was killed—run over by a steam engine, under highly suspicious circumstances. “His death was never investigated. There was never any follow-up. *Oh, it was an accident*. Well, people in my family didn’t believe that,” says Baker, pausing for a moment. “I don’t have any closure of that at all at this point in my life. It was not just our family, but our families, our community. There was a great tragedy.”
That sense of precarity—physically, psychologically, socially—can reverberate through generations. Part of the mission of the Lenape Center is to provide members of the diaspora with whatever tools they need to combat cultural erasure. “We are standing in a place today of one of the greatest genocides in the history of humankind,” Baker says. “They have failed to understand and embrace intellectually and emotionally the fact that there were violent acts of genocide that happened here to my people.”
“People are not educated about the Lenape. They’re not educated about the true history of Lenapehoking, these ancestral lands,” he told me. “They present Native people as relics of history; they’re past, they’re gone. And yet the reality is that there are five vibrant communities of Lenape.”
I ask Baker about the sticky nature of trying to piece together a community in a dispersed population, especially at the original site of that dispersal. “Not everyone wants to be here, but for those who do, we want to make it available—the resources that are here in this city, the educational resources, the cultural resources our people have a right to,” he says.
As the sun begins to dim, Baker tells me the Lenape Center is interested in reciprocal partnerships. Sometimes they’ll get calls that are essentially requests for the quickest, easiest version of an already bare minimum dialogue. What they “seldom hear” is folks asking how they can help. “My ancestors, I feel their energy, and it energizes me,” Baker says. “They were strategists. They had this intelligence to face an untenable future. And they used their skill and their wits and their intelligence to figure out how to survive: not just individually survive, but keep the community, ensure that the community continues.”
“The question inevitably arises,” James Weldon Johnson said in 1930. “Will the Negroes of Harlem be able to hold it?” The answer for the better part of a century was “yes,” at an unconscionable price. It was, I am certain, never his utopia. It burned, crumbled, and detonated; endured, flourished, and was—many times over—reborn. To be Black and in Harlem is to inherit the knowledge of both what makes a tomb and what makes a throne.
In time, this place will be lost. The Corner and Harlem. This could be 10 years from now; this could be 50. It is on borrowed ground that should never have been borrowed ground, and someday it will be borrowed again. The buildings will fall. New ones will rise. Mecca will dissolve, if it has not already.
No more beauty parlors, no more blacktops, no more head wraps, no more peace be upon yous, no more Lord to be praised, no more drumbeats, no more wah gwaan, no more cookouts, no more block parties—all of it, gone. There will be a day when Black Harlem is wiped clean from the earth. The shallow remodel that emerges from its bones will be insipid, sterile, intrinsically devoid. People will come with the same dreams people before them came with, but the difference is that theirs will come true.
You can watch them now, on and off of the Corner. They do not move how the offspring of Harlem move. They do not see what the promised can see. They cannot sense it: the life force, the rot, the time, spiraling down and gurgling up and touching everything. They have no access to these hidden plains, the lifetimes of wandering footprints concealed on weathered concrete blocks. They will not love Harlem, or hate Harlem, or feel anything about Harlem that’s as vast or inescapably heavy as all of the things that have already been felt in it.
What I have looked for—and what I now believe in—is the sliver of hope that Black Harlem might also be found. The Corner will pass, and Harlem will too, but never inside of those once drawn to its hope, once held in its clutches. Some have left or will leave: lured, pushed, or resigned to new basins. Others will try to defend their claim, as they always have. There is a cost and there is a prize to this Mecca, and it is that there was never any un-looping it. In Harlem, revival is one with destruction, so when it dies, it must live beyond its death.
This was around the time that you started to compete with the local boys and proved you could fill a sack with cotton bolls quicker. You knew you needed cash, so you made it in those tenant fields by the river. You were 16, bone-thin, dark like the other side of the moon, luminous, glowing. Before you learned when not to smile, how to laugh, and the proper kind of talk.
It was after you knew you would be an actor but before you’d put a claim on a stage. You had never seen snow. You had no idea how to move in a crowd. You were past lounging in those pecan trees or stuffing red dirt in your face. You were a reader, but more often, you made up worlds in your head. You knew a few kinds of love and a few kinds of sad.
Before you’d even thought of a baby. Your grandmother still carried that gun. You knew how not to look at white folks. You knew when to say, “Yes, ma’am.” You had read in the school library of a place where everyone was Black. Your heart started wandering past the parish our people picked when they got free.
Before your mother passed on with all that poison in her breasts. Before them doctors wouldn’t touch her. Before the thought that if you’d stayed, you might have saved her entered your head.
You packed into a car with your club-mates and took the back roads through Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas—all the way up past the Corner, Lenox and 125th.
Before you realized the difference between there and upstate. Before you lied up north in that interview and said you could type. Before you dropped out of college when you were really just scared. Before you said the only work you knew was picking, and that they didn’t have any cotton up there. Before you carried my father and carved out our life. Before I told you what I was writing and asked if I could tell it. You saw Harlem when it was *Harlem* and promised, “I’m going to live in this city.”
