Shane White

Disorderly Houses: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of Sexuality in 1920s Harlem

“W h i t e o n l o o k e r s . . . m u s t b e made to remember that Harlem is not merely exotic, it is human,” W. e. B. Du Bois wrote in the National Association for Coloured People’s magazine the Crisis in 1927. “It is not a spectacle and an entertainment, it is life; it is not chiefly cabarets, it is chiefly home.” In admonishing whites, Du Bois was assuming that homes presented a picture of black Americans different from that of public performances and that the residents of Harlem, New York City’s foremost African American neighborhood, had adopted the bourgeois domestic ideals promoted by the black middle class as a means of advancing the race toward equality. On other occasions, however, he was less certain of the propriety and order of black home life. Du Bois shared with reformers of both races a concern that many residences in growing urban neighborhoods were so overcrowded that their occupants lacked privacy, causing them to be corrupted by lodgers or pushed out into commercialized public spaces where men and women freely mixed. Such anxieties were rarely supported by evidence of what actually happened in homes. Instead, reformers followed

Harlem in Black and White: Mapping Race and Place in the 1920s

In the 1920s, as Harlem emerged as the largest black city in the world, a significant white presence remained in the neighborhood. Whites not only frequented nightlife, they owned and operated the vast majority of Harlem’s businesses, policed its streets, staffed its schools and hospital, drove its public transport and most of the vehicles traveling its streets, delivered goods, collected rent and insurance payments, and patronized sporting events. Scholars have made only brief mention of this presence and its impact on everyday life, portraying race relations as harmonious and inconsequential in a neighborhood represented as a segregated refuge from whites. Drawing on black newspapers and legal records, and using the Digital Harlem website to map and visualize that evidence of the white presence, reveals a very different picture, of interracial encounters that often led to conflict, and of Harlem as a place of contestation, negotiation, resistance, and accommodation.