Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

96 // HASIA R. DINER
conducted at Howard University by Lunabelle Wedlock, focusing on the ways in
which Black newspapers treated the rise of Naziism in Germany, uncovered
Jewish-Black spatial propinquity additionally in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and
Chicago. 34
Obviously the most important, and explosive, locus for this transition played
itself out in the upper reaches of New York City, in Harlem. Well-off American
Jews, primarily upper-middle class merchants and white collar workers, began
moving to Harlem in the 1870s. By 1900 it boasted an impressive panoply of
dignified institutions of bourgeois Jewish life. But in 1905, the neighborhood
began to change as less well-off Jews, Eastern European working class immigrants
abandoning the lower East Side and other zones of first settlement, took advantage
of a building boom in Harlem. As they moved in, the earlier Jewish denizens
of the area began to move out for more spacious quarters. Since the humbler Jews
far outnumbered the better-off ones, the size and density of the Jewish population
grew in the 1910s and early 1920s.
As Jewish immigration from Europe came to a virtual standstill in 1924, and
as other neighborhoods opened up for modest Jewish residence in the Bronx and
Brooklyn, the Jewish movement into Harlem began to end. Jewish institutions,
including synagogues, schools, community centers, kosher meat markets, and
bakeries followed their patrons to other areas. The Jewish Welfare Board in 1924
attributed the sunset of Jewish Harlem to "restriction on immigration, desire to
better oneself as economic status improves."
The first African Americans drifted northward to Harlem at the beginning of
the century, just as the more economically marginal Jews had. Small in number
at first, and relatively comfortable economically, Black families took up residence
on the fringes of the neighborhood, and then over time moved closer and closer
to 125th Street, the commercial center of the area. Like their Jewish counterparts,
they began to create the infrastructures of communal life, in some cases buying
up synagogues and converting them to churches. For a period from around 1905
through the mid-1920s, Blacks, increasingly humbler in class status, and poorer
Jews lived together there. But, the Jews enjoyed the possibility of leaving Harlem
when their economic situations improved. That is, those working class, lower East
Side Jews who had streamed into Harlem in the first decade of the century began
to move outward by the third, and by the fourth, had quite nearly completed their
abandonment of the area. Black residents, on the other hand, had no such route
outward. A combination of slow economic mobility, sometimes increased impoverishment,
the influx of massive numbers of very poor migrants swept in by the
Great Migration, and vicious discrimination in housing, locked Blacks in place.
Thus the neighborhood became less and less Jewish as it became increasingly
Black. The same Jewish Welfare Board assessment which linked Jewish outward
mobility from Harlem to "making it" economically also recognized the realities
of the racial situation, noting that Jews left also because of "the influx of negroes,
Italians, and Spanish-speaking groups." 35