“In the 1920s, Harlem was hot! The streets were crowded.

The nightclubs were hoppin’. The theaters were packed to the rafters.

And the poems and stories crackled with racial pride.

Without a doubt, Harlem was the center of the universe

if you were black or just a white hepcat from downtown who

knew where the action was…” (Hill 5)

Ethel Waters

Chick Webb

Fats Waller, one of the finest jazz composers and

musicians of the era

Interpretation of Harlem Jazz by Winold Reiss, 1925

“For the white population, jazz seemed to symbolize the times.

The war had radically changed national attitudes and the national rhythm. Life seemed to move faster now,

in this feverish era of industrial development and population movement.

Wartime prosperity brought more leisure time, more time to have fun.

The syncopated rhythms and improvised melodies of jazz

seemed to reflect the new American life.” (Haskins 44)

“Jazz wasn’t just music. It was music to dance to. Harlem nightclubs were the center of all the new steps–

the Charleston, the lindy hop, the black bottom, truckin’, snakehips, the break and more.

This illustration

by Miguel Covarrubias is of two dancers

doing the lindy hop, one of Harlem’s dances that caught fire across

America.” (Hill 96)

“The party was on, and Harlem was at the center of what F. Scott Fitzgerald came to call the “Jazz Age.”

And the Harlem speakeasy was the epicenter of it all because that’s where the jazz was.

Blaring trumpets, hot clarinets, and booming drums

could be heard up and down Lexington Ave. These sounds called people from the streets to come in,

brush off their troubles, and dance!

In the 1920s, jazz was dance music that made your foot tap and your hips sway.

It was an exuberant, carefree music with a driving rhythm and a blistering melody.”

(Hill 91)

Ivey Anderson performing with Duke

Ellington and his orchestra.

“The Cotton Club catered to white downtowners’ taste for the exotic. But the management decided that what

its intended audiences wanted was to observe the eroticism of Negroes,

not rub shoulders with them. Thus, the club’s policy

was that all the patrons were white, and all the employees, from the waiters to the dancers, singers and orchestra, were black.

It has been suggested that even the club’s name, Cotton Club,

was supposed to bring to mind images of the Old South

where slavery kept the races strictly apart.” (Haskins 70)

1929 movie called Black and Tan that features Duke Ellington and his orchestra with the stage

show at the Cotton Club.

“Drawing on the attitude of many whites that blacks were only a step removed from the jungle,

the club was decorated in a jungle décor, with numerous artificial palm trees and paintings of African

masks… If Duke Ellington felt confined by the expectations

of the white patrons at the Cotton Club, he never said so publicly.

He was a realist. He and the band needed work, and they were willing

to work in a club to which their own friends were not admitted.

If they were willing to work in a segregated club, they certainly weren’t going to protest the kind of music

they were expected to play. If the management and the audiences wanted jungle sounds,

then the band would give them jungle sounds.” (Haskins 73)

“Put it this way.

Jazz is a good

barometer of

freedom.”

Duke Ellington

Harlem sported more than 700 social clubs, which sponsored activities ranging from

noisy “chitterlin’ suppers” and “barrel house” parties

to stilted soirees, symposiums, and musicales.

The more rarefied of these clubs strived for a social correctness

that mirrored that of its downtown white counterparts.”

(Hill 84)

Young dancers in

Harlem

Young girls in Harlem

ballet class.

Young boy with violin.

Young boy with

violin.

“Strolling in Harlem does not mean merely walking along Lenox or upper 7th Ave. or 135th St.;

it means that those streets are places for socializing. One puts on one’s best clothes and fares forth

to pass the time pleasantly with friends and acquaintances and, most importantly,

the strangers he is sure of meeting. One saunters along, he hails this one,

exchanges a word or two with that one, stops for a short chat with the other one.

He comes up to a laughing, chattering group, in which he may have only one friend or acquaintance,

but that gives him the privilege of joining in. He does join in and takes part in the joking,

the small talk and gossip, and makes new acquaintances…

This is not simply going out for a walk; it is more like going out for an adventure.”

James Weldon Johnson

“Man, we strolled in Harlem. This was our turf.”

Elton Fox

1925 NY Parade