“Think about how this community has continued to exist. Think about all those other communities that have disappeared or burnt to the ground. We’ve been able to continue to thrive for a number of reasons, but I think it’s because we’ve been such a cultural center.
— Sydney Briggs
The recent death of Charlie Rangel, the “Lion of Lenox Avenue” who served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 46 years, showed just what the Black community is made of.
Yes, there was a service in Midtown’s St. Patrick’s cathedral, the “world stage” as Arva Rice, president of the New York Urban League, put it. It featured notables like Bill Clinton and Kathy Hochul, paying homage to a legendary statesman and Democratic Party leader.
But then there was the Harlem service at St. Aloysius on 132nd street for the home crew, which, according to Rice, included “two hundred people, tops… It was an ode to Harlem itself — tried and tested, never broken and always loyal to the projects, brownstones, apartments, churches, mosques, parks and people.”
Rangel was a resilient, unapologetically, but contradictorily Black warrior, and the St. Aloysius tribute was as much an expression of what Harlem values, and the code it lives by, as it was about lifting up a political icon from a bygone era.
In a neighborhood where Black identity, history and contributions to the world have been self-consciously transmitted through, sometimes, centuries-old art and performance houses, libraries, media outlets, churches and mosques, politics, and as the saying goes, is not just casually downstream from culture, but fiercely and famously so.
It’s worth remembering the importance of these culture-conveyance institutions as we observe Juneteenth, the national holiday commemorating the unofficial end of slavery, the moment when abolition was enforced in the western part of the Confederacy, and Texas slaves learned they were free.
Informally, Juneteenth is a celebration of Black American life and an aspirational assertion of our liberation — which feels both fraught and necessary when the disparagement of racial justice, the denial of Black excellence, and the open promotion of white supremacy are now de facto federal policy. It’s precisely in these moments, when we should consider that political institutions ain’t never saved us, but cultural revolution just might.
Black Cultural Institutions: Here to Stay
As an urban concentration of Black people, Harlem is both quintessentially representative and an outlier, which makes it an instructive prism through which to appreciate the impact of cultural centers, not only on neighborhood-based Black life, but on the wider world as well. There are Black enclaves, like Tremé in New Orleans, that are older than Harlem, and also feature a world-renowned black cultural heritage, but no jurisdiction has assembled Black cultural landmarks that include the likes of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the New York Amsterdam News, Apollo Theater, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Masjid Malcolm Shabazz (aka Muhammad Mosque No. 7), Rucker Park, Sylvia’s Restaurant, Harlem School of the Arts, Studio Museum of Harlem, National Black Theatre, and Dance Theatre of Harlem — all of which have remained under Black ownership or control while being open to patrons from across the globe.
Unlike conventional community-based “organizations” that usually have a shelf life of decades at best, these Harlem bodies stand as verifiable “institutions,” which is to say that they have been renewable in their leadership and financially sustainable over generations, and rooted in the idea that they will remain alive as long as there is a Black Harlem.
And perhaps no brand of cultural institution is as closely associated with the idea of collective Black survival as the Black church. Although their size and influence have waned over the past couple of decades, churches have, since the days of slavery, served as a primary source of shelter, community support, and communication, as well as a breeding ground for resistance and leadership.
A Faith-based Legacy
It’s no accident that Charles Rangel was an altar boy at St. Aloysius, and some of Harlem’s most celebrated leaders like Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and Jr., Samuel DeWitt Proctor and Calvin Butts were pastors at Abyssinian Baptist Church, once the largest Black church in New York City and largest Baptist congregation in the world.
“I think in order to measure the impact of Black churches you’ve got to look at not only who they produce, but what they have been involved in addressing,” offered Rev. S. Raschaad Hoggard, who served as Abyssinian’s interim minister after the death of Rev. Calvin Butts. “Historically they’ve asked, ‘How can we respond to the pressing needs, demands, and plight of black people?’ And then do it in such a way where [Black people] will see themselves as fully human.”
For instance, Abyssinian and other Harlem churches spawned the Abyssinian Development Corporation and Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, which built affordable housing, schools, retail stores and senior services.
Former NYC Deputy Mayor and United Way of NYC CEO, Sheena Wright, once served as the chief executive officer of Abyssinian Development Corporation. She first arrived in Harlem from the South Bronx with her family as a seventeen-year-old. Wright believes the Black church was “probably the seminal cultural institution in Harlem, not only for fellowship, but for art and culture as well: The music ministries, the dance ministries, the performance and art, the nurturing of public speaking. The churches have been keepers and archivers of family histories and community history. They have been the places where the community comes together to be activated, politically and socially, whether it’s for protests or for learning about social issues and empowerment.”
Former Schools’ Chancellor and second-generation Harlem resident, David Banks, who opened up an Eagle Academy school in Harlem, added that the church helped to “ground you. Ultimately, the church isn’t just about an affirmation of your faith and your relationship with God, but it is also about how we treat one another, and how we take care of our own.”
The Business of Black Culture
Whether it’s a church, a theater, media company or political machine, this theme of “taking care of our own” is a thread running throughout Harlem’s institution-building. It has defined the public life of Manhattan Deputy Borough President Keisha Sutton-James, herself an intersection point for the building of Black political and cultural infrastructure in Harlem. Brought into the family business by her father, Pierre Sutton and grandfather, the former Manhattan Borough President and one-time NYC mayoral candidate, Percy Sutton, Keisha had a front row seat to her family’s investments in the Amsterdam News, Apollo theater, and the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation, which featured pioneering radio stations such as WBLS and WLIB.
“Making a ton of money was never the goal. It was to affirm and lift up culture that would impact political discourse and ultimately impact political outcome.” When Percy Sutton bought WBLS, Keisha said, “Black radio was a whole lot of liquor ads, cigarette ads, and pawn shops, and that kind of stuff. And [Inner City Broadcasting] refused to take that kind of advertising because it wasn’t good for the culture. They also brought in teachers and linguists to create an elevated listening experience that was ripe with Black cultural excellence.”
In Sutton’s telling, her family’s enterprises helped introduce mass audiences to an emerging art form that would come to transform popular culture. “We were the only commercial radio station and the only commercial theater in New York City that were playing rap music and putting on rap concerts.”
Harlem Without Borders
Harlem has in fact gotten so proficient at exporting local culture, that it has become an international brand. It would be unfair to compare 2025 Harlem to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, which at times was characterized by the exoticization of Black bodies and art, but gentrification and tourism over the past two decades have arguably muted Harlem’s Black cultural resonance. Which begs the questions: Can Black Harlem survive a transformation of its population and physical landscape? And what is to prevent this geographically defined, nationally significant capture of Black memory and identity from fading?
The answer may lie in the example of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Harlem resident Sydney Briggs, the director of registration at the American Federation of Arts, and a former director of collections and exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, described both the Apollo and Studio Museum alike as “places where some of the most important artists in the African diaspora have come to because it was one of the few places that allowed us to be free and be ourselves.”
What’s instructive about the Studio Museum is that its brick and mortar headquarters has been closed since 2018, while a new building is being constructed. Rather than seeing this as a limitation, Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum’s Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator, saw this as an opportunity. As the museum continued to operate in mobile, decentralized and virtual ways, it not only introduced itself to new audiences within Harlem, but also introduced Black art to other corners of the city.
“Thelma brilliantly master-minded this way to keep the Studio Museum top of mind,” Briggs said. “She was able to work with the Museum of Modern Art, to introduce a bunch of talented artists to MoMa, and get program space on the ground floor of MoMa that you don’t have to pay an admission fee for. And then the Artist-in-Residence program was still happening because Thelma was able to find alternate space in Harlem, so the artist would be in the studio for almost 11 months, and the culmination of that residency would be an exhibition. Typically the exhibition would take place in the studio museum galleries, so what she did in the interim was to have the exhibition at MoMA PS1.”
Briggs points to other instances in which the Schomburg, Classical Theatre of Harlem, and Dance Theatre of Harlem have been able to “take their show on the road” and “introduce ideas that have typically been living in Harlem and placing them in a new environment.” In other words, Harlem institutions don’t even have to actually be in Harlem to be true to their mission.
So maybe we’ve been looking at Harlem all wrong. It’s easy to focus on its physical formation –– its wide boulevards, its architecture, its expanse of Black and multiracial humanity –– and make it into something fixed and static. But neighborhoods, by definition, are in a constant state of transition. In that respect, maybe Harlem is not even a collection of histories, but a big idea, one that can be written down, indexed, dramatized and choreographed. It’s a stubborn conviction that people of African descent living in these United States are, like say, Charlie Rangel, Arthur Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, et al, a complicated, resilient and endlessly creative people. As Billie Holiday once sang, “Oh no, they can’t take that away from me.”
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