harlem renaissance | Pandaemonium

THE CHANGING FACE OF HARLEM

April 30, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Harlem was not always synonymous with African Americans. In the late-nineteenth century, it was home to a predominantly Jewish community – in his book When Harlem Was Jewish, historian Jeffrey Gurock estimates that almost 200,000 Jews lived there on the eve of the First World War. By 1930 that had fallen to just 5000. ‘Harlem’s era as a landmark on the Jewish map of New York was over’, Gurock observes. The reasons for the transformation were many and complex – […]

Categories: Photos, Race & Immigration • Tags: america, gentrification, harlem, harlem renaissance, jews, new york, photography, racism

JACOB LAWRENCE AND THE GREAT MIGRATION (5)

February 15, 2015 by Kenan Malik

I have been running a series of posts about Jacob Lawrence and his depiction of the Great Migration. Lawrence was one of America’s most important twentieth century painters, and the Great Migration, the exodus of African Americans from the Southern states to the Northern cities from 1915 onwards, one of the pivotal events of American history. Lawrence portrayal of that exodus, an epic work of 60 panels, is his most famous work, a work as much of historical memory as […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, art, harlem renaissance, jacob lawrence, the great migration, usa

JACOB LAWRENCE AND THE GREAT MIGRATION

December 21, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Beginning in 1915, some six million black African Americans from the South joined an exodus to the northern cities – Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York and many others. This was the Great Migration. It was the result both of the conditions in which African Americans found themselves in the South and the labour needs of Northern employers. After post-Civil War Reconstruction, white supremacy had largely been restored across the South, enforced though the Jim Crow laws. It was a segregated […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Race & Immigration • Tags: african americans, art, black culture, black identity, harlem renaissance, jacob lawrence, modernism, robert hughes, the great migration, usa