"Black America"

Johnson, James W., and David L. Lewis. "Black Manhattan." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 34-35. Print.

As horrible as it sounds, I thought an emphatic “Good” when I read up to the point of this essay where the black family with the physician father shot into the crowd that was attempting to force them out of their home. The absolute arrogance and disgusting attitudes of the white people trying to force a black family out of their new home simply because they were black boils my blood; how can anyone, of any color, be that completely pompous? The only analogous group that I can think of today would be zealot Christians, and even they tend to respect the law. Not that it would have made it any more acceptable, but the fact that the black family was well-off even furthers the racist sentiments behind the mob attack – the angry people couldn’t have even argued that they wanted the black family out of their neighborhood for fear of their property values declining. No; it was an act of out and out racism, and I completely believe that, had I been in the shoes of that family, I would have fired more than just a single shot into the crowd.

Those thoughts aside, the first few paragraphs of the essay speak highly of the white population of Manhattan prior to the influx of black families. The fact that black families were able to purchase so much property, live together in harmony, and escape prejudice and racism is fantastic, and surely held a large role in the following years of the Harlem Renaissance. Had the black men and women that became the voices of black Americans not been able to settle into their own lives independent of their white neighbors, the Renaissance would not have happened. For such an outpouring of literature and arts of such a black-specific culture to occur, those men and women needed a community in which they felt safe enough to write and do some of the things they did. Without the safety offered by the well-off Harlem area to black Americans, which of the now-famous writers would have dared publishing protests of white treatment against blacks? Very few, and those that did would have met similar fates as the physician family.

I suppose that, as sick as it is, any kind of movement for radical societal change is going to come up against the thickheaded conservative roadblock, and mob outbreaks are always a factor. The same type of situation has happened plenty of times during other major changes: the women’s right movement, the movement for Irish equality, and today we’re facing horrible crimes as the gay rights movement picks up speed. It’s pathetic that the people who advocate violence in the name of their selfish beliefs don’t learn from their parents’ generation of mistakes… maybe the world would be a better place if they did.