So you want to learn about Harlem? Books on Harlem’s real and fictional histories

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Some might imagine that one book can tell all there is to know concerning Harlem. Impossible! Because, though often long forgotten, before it was Black, or even gentrifying, the storied neighborhood involved myriad inhabitants of varied backgrounds, occupying the same place, bearing that name across time — that history is all Harlem too. The Lenape’s summer waterfront resort and planting ground gave way, after a shaky start, to the town Dutch imperialists christened Nieuw Haarlem. Its chief function was to grow food to feed residents of the more important commercial port of Nieuw Amsterdam. Ten miles apart, the settlements had the same sort of geographic relationship as their namesakes in the Netherlands.

Sometime later, like folks out East in the Hamptons of today, Harlem was mostly home to a few rich people who spent the cold months downtown but came here when it got hot. Enslaved Africans made life pleasant. These stately mansions of the elite on landscaped estates were easy to get away to. 

Not long before African Americans claimed Harlem, circa 1920, there were sections that were German and Jewish, Irish and Catholic, and Italian and Roman Catholic. 

Elegant or rustic, a tangible, specific, and concrete Harlem can be explored in the book, “Harlem Lost and Found: An Architectural and Social History, 1795-1915” by yours truly, Michael Henry Adams (New York: Monacelli Press, 2002). 

But, there’s another amorphous, more spiritual, sometimes imaginary Harlem as well. It can better be encountered in “Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America” by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011).

Celebrated for a 100 years as the African American Cultural Capital, it once seemed, until quite recently, as if Harlem as the spot — the special, thriving Black center of cultural achievement and political ambition — and might continue to go on from strength to strength, forever. Yet, even when I moved here in 1985 to attend graduate school at Columbia, that place seemed to have already begun to morph, from lived experience, into a wounded by wonderful myth.

Since Ms. Rhodes-Pitts‘ elegiac meditation was published fourteen years ago, a pivotal moment in Harlem’s history has passed. Far beyond mere encroachment, gentrification has actually dislodged some guardians of Black heritage. Stalwart residents like Rhodes-Pitts, one had thought to be ‘forever Harlemites,’ have vanished. Far beyond her quietly decamping for Brooklyn, so many of the representative idiosyncratic characters Rhodes-Pitts vividly chronicles have also left, some to become ‘dearly departed.’ So it’s clear that there’s been an elemental change.

What remains? It is a place, a Harlem, more fabled and mythic, more a realm of the imagination, than ever. Therein lies this slight volume’s enormous value — its record of a place that’s more nowhere than ever. One, that some say, has ceased to exist. 

Going or gone, reviving or resurrecting? The only constant of Harlem is a momentous, calamitous, and always revivifying history. It generates ever-new scholarship, which also inspires new fictional adaptations. Here are some of the best. 

Only take note: these selections, whether novels or nonfiction, are all excellent, even those without commentary only lacked additional space. Each is highly recommended.

“The New Negro: An Interpretation” by Alain Leroy Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1925)

Edited by America’s first and last Rhodes scholar for fifty years. Before being published in book form, this monumental anthology first appeared as an issue of the journal, Survey Graphic. A compilation of fiction, poetry, and essays about African and African American heritage and advancement, some scholars contend that it officially launched the Harlem Renaissance, with Locke, who headed the philosophy department at Howard University, acting as the movement’s godfather. 

It showcases aesthetic and academic creativity emergent from an ascendant Black community. Besides Locke’s introductory analysis, it includes contributions from towering figures, including Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. 

Reading it today, discovering so many leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance were queer, one is impressed by the diversity and inclusiveness of Harlem’s intellectual life a century ago. One is also both reassured of the vitality of Black greatness, and actually astonished that so high a level of accomplishment should be attained by so many, following 300 years of enforced illiteracy, such a short time after slavery’s end. 

“Black Manhattan” by James Weldon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf: NY, 1930)

This essential text compellingly traces the evolving demographic and experience of African Americans in New York City’s most affluent borough. From a pre-Revolutionary War Black community at Chatham Square, it moves to the “Little Africa” section of Greenwich Village. Shifting ever northward, it travels from Midtown-West’s “Tenderloin”, to what’s now the location of Lincoln Center — once a neighborhood Black residents shared contentiously with European immigrants, known as “San Juan Hill. 

Black Manhattan is the work of accomplished writer, poet, lyricist, lawyer, educator, diplomat, NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson. Like his brother, musicologist J. Rosamond Johnson, today he’s best remembered for creating Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Black National anthem. 

The book concludes in 1920s Harlem, then the “World’s Black Mecca”. Contextualizing where and how Black New Yorkers have lived, it still raises searing questions about how this particular place is bound up by issues of our culture, identity, and struggle. Most poignantly, Johnson wonders about Harlem’s  ”promised land,” becoming overcrowded and unaffordable due to rising property values. Will an African American presence even be possible to maintain? 

Optimistically, he posits that because of Black institutions, like the Schomburg, a Black historical imprint will endure. Perhaps underestimating commercial and political manipulation, he hopes that because of Black ownership of Harlem property, resources will enable Blacks to enrich wherever we might move on to in the future. 

“Harlem Shuffle” by Colson Whitehead (New York: Doubleday, 2021) and 

“Crook Manifesto” by Colson Whitehead (New York: Doubleday 2023)

The first two books of Colson Whitehead’s projected Harlem Trilogy. Disguised as a thrilling romp, what Whitehead actually presents, an existential examination of how race and resources can profoundly impact society’s power dynamic. Set as Harlem is succumbing to indifference, it falls apart between 1959 and 1964 and then into the 1970s. This family’s saga, with one honest man’s desire for prosperity and community regard, leads to an all-out battle between temptation and propriety. 

How will it all turn out? There’s only one way to know. What most makes it worth learning is that this narrative is our story too. 

“The Street” by Ann Petry (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946)

Seeking greater understanding about how things were in post-WWII Harlem? Heroin addicts nodding in hopelessness, good girls dreaming, landlords scheming, misogyny, racism, elitism, and betrayal, are all to be found in this novel set on 116th Street; the first work of fiction by a Black woman to sell over a million copies.

“When Harlem Was in Vogue” by David Levering Lewis (New York: Knopf, 1981)

A fascinating account of the irony of unintended consequences. The same racism designating Harlem as the destination of Great Migration refugees, fleeing alike from Southern tyranny and Caribbean economic decline, fostered artistic and intellectual creativity as well. So vast a quantity of new residents assured a large number who were exceedingly talented. Drawn out from former isolation, concentrated strategically to form relationships enriching to the New Negro Movement, as never before African Americans advanced to our nation’s cultural and social vanguard. With Jarvis Anderson and others, Lewis was not only among the first to reveal that cultural catalysts like Langston Hughes, Edna Thomas, Wallace Thurman, and Ethel Waters were Gay, but by treating issues like sexuality in an unsensational way, he deemed them to be OK. Most of all, a great deal about Harlem’s creativity and continuity can be found here. 

Mercy of a Rude Stream. Volume 2: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park by Henry Roth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994)

Part of Roth’s masterpiece trilogy, this story began during the Great Depression. Because of writer’s block, neither it nor the final book was completed for another forty years. Fictionalized autobiography, no other source better portrays an extraordinary era, when Harlem was made up of four competitive communities of different ethnicities: Jewish, white Christian, Italian, and African American.  Each enclave had its own distinct character and customs. There were separate Y’s, houses of worship, and shopping thoroughfares in each section. But with dreams of self-improvement offered by City College as common ground,  intimidation and cooperation assured for, a more peaceful, coexistence. 

“Epic Harlem: A Narrative History by Herb Boyd” (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming)

Get the perspective of life-long, long-term journalist and Harlem observer, Boyd and find out what he thinks it is that makes Harlem tick, and if it will be the same without Black cultural continuity.

“Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890-1920”

By Kevin McGruder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)

Due to property owners not paying the water rates or property tax they owed, as of 1990, the city of New York had come to own fully two-thirds of all of Harlem’s housing. Would it surprise you then, to learn, how less than a century prior, the same sort of dialectic of racism, redlining, and greed, were what caused Harlem to change from white to Black, almost overnight? There is no finer or more thorough explanation about how it all happened than this. 

“Manchild in the Promised Land” by Claude Brown (New York: Macmillan, 1965)

A dramatized autobiographical account of life on Harlem’s meanest street, 145th Street in the Valley.

Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes (1965)

A wild comic tale of dope deals and double-cross.

“Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890-1930” by Gilbert Osofsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1966) 

Harlem from white to Black and rich to poor, when and why. 

“Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968” by Allon Schoener (New York: Random House, 1968)

Harlem in pictures and Amsterdam News clips. The pictures of beautifully dressed, proud Black Harlemites by James Van Der Zee changed the life of a 13-year-old me in Akron, Ohio.