Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the introduction to A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Voices of an American Community, an anthology edited by Lionel C. Bascum that contains materials produced by Harlem-based members of the 1930s federally funded Writer's Project (©1999 by Lionel C. Bascum).

A few years after America slipped into the Great Depression, a significant social experiment got under way. In the 1930s, government policy makers conceived and launched an ambitious scheme they hoped would both lift the spirits of and provide weekly pay-checks for thousands of unemployed Americans. Under this Works Progress Administration, a smaller, controversial program called the Writer's Project employed some sixty-five hundred writers in twenty-six states. WPA writers fanned out in neighborhoods of towns and cities all across America with a tantalizing assignment: record the personal histories of the people they found. They recorded more than ten thousand stories and were planning to publish them in a series of comprehensive anthologies.

One of those places where people told their stories was in Harlem. Coincidentally, just a few years before a handful of WPA writers arrived in Harlem, this section of upper Manhattan had just been recognized by social observers as the black capital of the world. The period would become widely known as the Harlem Renaissance. It was touted mainly as the most significant black cultural revival in our history and was promoted by a very small band of intellectuals who had migrated to Harlem along with thousands of other people. While these men and women promoted the art and literature they created in Harlem between 1924 and 1929, the Renaissance they are credited with starting was much more than an intellectual movement.

The driving forces behind the varied activities that made Harlem so vibrant in the twentieth century were sparked by the massive migration of black people from the rural South and the Caribbean. When these seekers from far-flung corners of the world began filling the vacant but plentiful housing Harlem had to offer, these railroad porters, domestic house cleaners, former tenant farmers, and immigrants brought their music, their literature, and their stories with them uptown to Harlem.

Their stories about daily life are still a vital part of the literature and music of Harlem. As told by the WPA writers, these tales leave an important legacy for us today. Between 1934 and 1939, African-American writers recruited to join the WPA Writer's Project took advantage of a unique opportunity to write the topical history of Harlem. Inadvertently, they created a narrative snapshot of black America's unofficial capital city during one of its most important historical periods. They created a rare picture of life on Harlem streets, in its beauty parlors, markets, apartments, and hospital waiting rooms.

The works of Harlem WPA writers such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West were all written in the late 1930s, which suggests that Harlem's golden era existed well beyond 1929. While none of the stories in A Renaissance in Harlem are fictional in the strictest sense of the word, many of them are literary versions crafted by writers who struggled to accurately tell the stories they found ini creative ways. They often used the techniques of fiction, such as setting scenes, using realistic dialogue, or incorporating flashbacks. As a testament to the significance these stories held for the writers who collected them, many of these interviews became the raw material for later works of important fiction. For example,Ellison roamed Harlem, interviewing all sorts of people whose words found their way into his landmark novel, Invisible Man.

Despite the seemingly sacred mission, political forces opposed to the use of federal money for WPA projects moved against sponsoring New Deal Democrats. By the fall of 1939, all new funds for WPA projects had dried up.According to federal records, the WPA was effectively dead by the time America entered World War II. Thousands of the WPA manuscripts were never published. While some of these narratives were shelved, others were lost, destroyed, or distributed to various libraries and state archives. As a body of work, most of these stories would be stored away and left virtually untouched for decades. The Harlem manuscripts suffered this same fate.

A Renaissance in Harlem brings together more than forty-five stories written by the many different WPA writers who worked in Harlem. While some like Ellison eventually won worldwide acclaim, most, like Vivian Morris, remained obscure, invisible men and women despite the literary promise of their work. These stories are further evidence that there was a renaissance in Harlem, one that may have been completely missed by some of the intellectuals who first coined the phrase.