Harlem, Then And Now

Speakeasies, drag balls, the Cotton Club, literary salons, Alexander Gumby's bookstore, hot jazz. All of these activities and venues and much, much more were a significant part of Harlem's social scene in the 1920s. This historical period is now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance, or the Harlem Awakening, as one scholar in Negro Digest magazine preferred to call it, was an intellectual and cultural movement--involving literature, art, music, and the theatre--out of which emerged such notables as writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay; musicians Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters; and artist Aaron Douglas, to name a few.

What's happening in Harlem today has been called by real estate developers, "the second Harlem Renaissance." Actually this "second renaissance," if it can be called that, is really about real estate, gentrification, and displacement of longtime residents.

The attempt to rename Harlem by calling it SoHa (an acronym for South Harlem) to make it more trendy and attractive to gentrifiers is designed to erase the glorious history of an area called the Capital of Black America, an area that has contributed a lot culturally to America as well as the world. Thankfully there are those in Harlem who are rebelling against the renaming of this world-famous community.