Exotic Negroes At The Cotton Club

In 1923, Owney Madden, a powerful and feared New York gangster with ties to "Dutch" Schultz, opened the Cotton Club on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. It served two functions: first, Madden needed a place to sell the beer he illegally made for his Prohibition-era customers. And second, he wanted to take advantage of the newfound white interest in black artistic achievement.

In the days before the Great Depression, writes black playwright Loften Mitchell, "Harlem was seen by outsiders as a showplace, a center of nightlife, a place for discovering 'exotic Negroes' and new art." It was the time of the Harlem Renaissance, when black writers and artists such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston were, in the words of Hughes, "express[ing] our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame." It was also the time when whites from downtown and abroad came to Harlem to hobnob with struggling young black writers and artists in the salon of A'Lelia Walker, the daughter of Madame C.J. Walker, the black woman who became a millionaire by creating a hair-straightening process for blacks.

Carl Van Vechten, a white journalist and critic, is considered the primary catalyst for this influx of whites to Harlem. "As an influential critic, he helped launch the careers of numerous talented blacks," writes historian  Eric Garber of San Francisco, who's working on a study of the gay scene in Harlem in the 1920s. "But he is most notorious for his 1926 novel, naively titled 'Nigger Heaven', [which] told the story of the tragic love between a young black writer and his Harlem girlfriend and was intended to impart a sympathetic understanding of  Harlem and its people. Some of Van Vechten's black friends appreciated it, but the majority of Harlem was outraged."

"The white reading public," continues Garber, "had the opposite reaction, and the novel quickly became a best seller. After reading the novel, many whites hurried to Harlem to see the real thing."

And many of them hurried to the Cotton Club, which catered exclusively to a white clientele. "The low class of whites didn't come to the Cotton Club," recalls 81-year-old Joe Attles, a black former nightclub singer and dancer, "because they couldn't pay the money. All the young Vanderbilts and the This-and-Thats, they came to Harlem. They were young  and they had money. The rest of them who came to Harlem were gangsters. They came to visit the other gangs."

No blacks were allowed as customers--"unless you were a celebrity, like [dancer Bill]Bojangles [Robinson]," writes Langston Hughes in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea. "So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community"--a community that by 1930 was 200,000 strong.

The only other blacks allowed in the club were those hired as entertainers, waiters, or kitchen help. But despite its discriminatory admission policy, the Cotton Club launched many show business careers. Included among its alumni are Lena Horne (who in 1933, at the age of 16, joined the chorus line), Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, and the dancing Nicholas Brothers.

This is an excerpt from an article that was published in the San Francisco Chronicle (via syndication by the Los Angeles Times) on December 23, 1984.