HARLEM
The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America
By Jonathan Gill
Grove. 520 pp. $29.95
In September 1609 the English explorer Henry Hudson, en route - or so he hoped - to China in a ship belonging to the Dutch East India Company and called the Half Moon, steered into the river that in time would bear his name. He was attacked by native residents of the northern part of the island they called Manahatta. Blood was shed, and lives were lost, "a foretaste of Harlem's future," Jonathan Gill writes. He continues:
"The clash of words and worlds, the allure of blood and money, the primacy of violence and fashion, the cohabitation of racial hatred and racial curiosity - they have always been part of what uptown means. But from its days as a frontier outpost, to the time when it seemed like the navel of the black universe, to the era when it became the official symbol of poverty in America, Harlem has always been more than a tragedy in the making. . . . Through it all, Harlem's contending forces of power and protest, intention and improvisation, greed and generosity, and sanctity and suspicion decisively shaped the American character."
This may seem at first glance the exaggeration of a historian trying to make a case for the importance of his subject, but there is a good deal of truth to it. Though Harlem's strongest claim on history's attention indeed is its long role as the de facto capital of black America, Gill's account of what has occurred there in the four centuries since Hudson's arrival makes plain that there is much more to the story than that. Harlem was settled by the Dutch, who were then displaced by the British, who were themselves dealt a serious blow by George Washington in the Battle of Harlem Heights. In the two centuries that followed, Harlem served as a resort for the wealthy of lower Manhattan, transformed itself from a bucolic community to an urban metropolis, was "one of the largest Jewish communities in the world," and then, early in the 20th century, became the true heart of the African American population, which it has remained ever since.
Gill, a historian who has taught at Columbia and is on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, has done a stupendous amount of research, some of which might best have been left in his files. Though his "Harlem" certainly is authoritative and exhaustive, in addition to being well-written and perceptive, it also is exhausting and would have gained from being cut by at least 50 pages. Many of the details of Harlem's political life could have been set aside, and some of the portraits of its most notable and familiar figures - Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin, Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, Langston Hughes, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. et al. - would have lost nothing by being briefer.
It seems fair, though, to consider this excessive length as a sign of the author's enthusiasm for his subject. We are in Gill's debt for digging so deeply into Harlem's past, for describing it with no agenda beyond thoroughness and fairness, and for reminding us that there is so much in Harlem to honor and celebrate as well as to deplore and lament. It is one of the most significant neighborhoods in the country, and its contributions - in social leadership, in literature and the arts - have been huge and invaluable.
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